Quotulatiousness

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 22, 2023

California – Embrace the Unicorn! No, the other Unicorn!

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

Chris Bray on California’s hoped-for path to transition away from fossil fuels:

California has the progressive vision to go all-electric, with laws and regulations that phase out gas water heaters, furnaces, and cars in the near future — while transitioning away from the production of electricity through the use of nuclear and natural gas technologies. Putting the teensy-weensy engineering questions aside and embracing the unicorn, this deep blue vision of the future means the state needs to build wind and solar power facilities in massive quantities, and now. California currently has about half the power it needs to do what it says it plans to do in just ten years.

But President Joe Biden just announced a move that aggressively advances the progressive vision of preserving wilderness and preventing development, naming the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in the Mojave Desert — preventing solar and wind development on 506,814 acres of lightly populated and federally owned desert land. The coalition of tribal and community groups that has worked to get the national monument designated make the anti-solar point explicit on their website:

Where progressive coastal urbanites see the progressive project of decarbonization, people in wilderness-adjacent areas see industrial blight, and express that view in the language of progressive conservationism. To a degree not explored by the false binary of media-defined American politics, in which good people on the left face bad people on the right, California’s future is an increasingly sharp conflict between left and left — and note what kind of permits energy companies have to get to build big wind and solar plants in the desert:

When progressive California builds its progressive energy infrastructure, it’s going to incidentally take a shit-ton of bighorns and tortoises and birds. I assume I don’t have to explain the euphemism.

March 21, 2023

The reason there are no EV charging facilities along the Interstate Highway System

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jon Miltimore explains why a 1956 law prohibits the installation of EV charging bays anywhere on the Interstate:

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

In 1956, Ike signed into law a bill — the Federal-Aid Highway Act — that paved the way (pun intended) for the interstate highway system, which included rest areas at convenient locations.

While there were numerous problems with the legislation, a relatively minor one was that it created strict limits on what could be sold at these rest stops. Today, federal law limits commercial sales to only a few items (including lottery tickets), the Verify team found. When President Joe Biden rolled out a $5 billion funding plan for states to create EV charging stations, he neglected to carve out a commercial exemption for EVs.

“You would be paying for that energy”, Natalie Dale of the Georgia Department of Transportation told WXIA-TV Atlanta. “That would count as commercialized use of the right-of-way and therefore not allowed under current federal regulations.”

If you think this sounds like an inauspicious roll out to the massive federal EV program, you’re not wrong.

Allowing drivers to charge their EVs at convenient, familiar locations that already exist along interstate highways is a no-brainer — yet this simple idea eluded lawmakers in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, it illustrates a much larger problem with the top-down blueprint central planners are using to create their EV charging station network.

“We have approved plans for all 50 States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia to help ensure that Americans in every part of the country … can be positioned to unlock the savings and benefits of electric vehicles”, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a 2022 statement.

While it’s good the DOT isn’t trying to single-handedly map out the locations of thousands of EV charging stations across the country, there’s little reason to believe that state bureaucrats will be much more efficient. A review of state plans reveals a labyrinth of rules, regulations, and stakeholders dictating everything from the maximum distance of EV stations from highways and interstates to the types of charging equipment stations can use to the types of power capabilities charging stations must have.

The primary reason drivers enjoy the great convenience of gasoline stations across the country — there are some 145,000 of them today — is that they rely on market forces, not central planning. Each year hundreds of new filling stations are created, not because a bureaucrat identified the right location but because an entrepreneur saw an opportunity for profit.

March 7, 2023

How Would a Nuclear EMP Affect the Power Grid?

Filed under: History, Military, Science, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published 8 Nov 2022

How a nuclear blast in the upper atmosphere could disable the power grid.
(more…)

February 13, 2023

Appliance futility by design

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

Tal Bachman recounts a miserable — but increasingly common — experience with modern “energy efficient” home appliances:

The LG 5.8 cubic foot Capacity Top Load Washer sat in the laundry room, brand new. Maybe it was my imagination, but it looked insouciant.

Dad said it was the latest and greatest in laundering technology. Supposedly, some sort of internal sensor system (having something to do with a computer) fine-tuned water levels depending on clothing weight. Or something. I can’t remember exactly what he — or was it the moving guy? — said.

I did notice the washing machine had several preset wash cycles — Allergiene, Sanitary, Bright Whites, Towels, Heavy Duty, Bedding, and more. You could select them with a shiny, space-age-looking chrome dial. (I would later discover the machine had other fancy features with names like TurboWash™ 360, ENERGY STAR® Qualified, Smart Diagnosis™, and ThinQ™ Technology [Wi-Fi Enabled]).

[…]

Well, it was win-win-win, with a minor caveat. The caveat was the washing machine. Turns out that for all its razzle-dazzle features, it didn’t actually clean clothes. Even worse, it took hours to not clean clothes. The “Allergiene” cycle, for example, took almost four hours. Yet when you pulled your clothes out, you could still make out the orange juice or tomato sauce stains. I’d never encountered a more useless washing machine.

“How you feeling about this new washing machine?”, I asked Dad, a few days after the hunkering down began.
“Great!”, said Dad.

Okay, I thought. That’s not unusual. Music — as opposed to the mundane or practical — occupies most of Dad’s awareness, and always has. Besides, most of his clothes are black, and he probably hasn’t noticed it’s not removing the ketchup stains. Maybe he will in a few weeks.

And maybe in the meantime, I thought, I could figure out a way to reprogram the machine for cycles which actually washed. And were faster.

But no. That turned out to be way too much to hope for. The machine allowed no independent control over water volume, cycle time, or water temperatures. It only allowed selection of a preset computerized cycle — none of which got your clothes clean.

[…]

Yet more irritating was the reason it skimped on water and power: it was trying to stop global warming. Oops — I mean “climate change”. It was “environmentally friendly”. Except it wasn’t, because you usually had to run at least two cycles to get your clothes clean. That’s right: you had to use the same amount of water in the end anyway, and double the electricity.

And so — not for the first time — I had stumbled upon yet another example of technological “progress” which exacerbated the very (pseudo) problem it purported to solve. The new useless LG “Save the World!” piece of garbage was the home equivalent of Hollywood stars taking private jets to a carbon reduction conference in Switzerland.

[…]

The US Department of Energy, I discovered, had begun imposing energy efficiency regulations in the early 1990s. A decade later, they made the regulations even stricter (see here also). Then, as the years passed, they made them even stricter. And then stricter. And then stricter. All the while, the feds offered appliance manufacturers huge tax incentives — i.e., huge cash rewards — to accelerate their phase out of functional washing machines.

Government succeeded. Today, minus the loophole-exploiting Speed-King (which the feds will probably crush soon), you cannot find a new washing machine — front- or top-loading — which washes clothes anywhere near as well as its predecessors. The rationale for this — saving the world from global warming — doesn’t even rise to the level of ludicrous. Just for starters, as I type this, we’re enduring one of the coldest winters ever recorded. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory just recorded a wind chill calculation of minus 109 degrees Farenheit, an all-time record for the United States (and approaching midway between the average temperatures of Jupiter and Mars). Temperatures are thirty degrees Farenheit colder than average in many places. Why would anyone want to bring temperatures down even further? And at the cost of destroying washing machine functionality? And what loon could actually believe home washing machines change the climate?

In any case, thanks to an essentially totalitarian government run by bought-and-paid-for liars, control freaks, and imbeciles, we have gone technologically backward — certainly in the appliance domain, but in others — for no good reason at all. (Regulations have also downgraded dishwashers, toilets, showers, and other appliances, but we can discuss those another time)

Back in 2019, Sarah Hoyt expressed her frustrations with “modern” “energy-efficient” appliances which matched our experiences exactly.

November 12, 2022

Climate imperialism

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Economics, Environment, Germany, India — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Shellenberger on the breathtaking hypocrisy of first world nations’ rhetoric toward developing countries’ attempts to improve their domestic energy production:

What’s worse, global elites are demanding that poor nations in the global south forgo fossil fuels, including natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, at a time of the worst energy crisis in modern history. None of this has stopped European nations from seeking natural gas to import from Africa for their own use.

Rich nations have for years demanded that India and Pakistan not burn coal. But now, Europe is bidding up the global price of liquified natural gas (LNG), leaving Pakistan forced to ration limited natural gas supplies this winter because Europeans — the same ones demanding Pakistan not burn coal — have bid up the price of natural gas, making it unaffordable.

At last year’s climate talks, 20 nations promised to stop all funding for fossil fuel projects abroad. Germany paid South Africa $800 million to promise not to burn coal. Since then, Germany’s imports of coal have increased eight-fold. As for India, it will need to build 10 to 20 full-sized (28 gigawatts) coal-fired power plants over the next eight years to meet a doubling of electricity demand.

This is climate imperialism. Rich nations are only agreeing to help poor nations so long as they use energy sources that cannot lift themselves out of poverty.

Consider the case of Norway, Europe’s second-largest gas supplier after Russia. Last year it agreed to increase natural gas exports by 2 billion cubic meters, in order to alleviate energy shortages. At the same time, Norway is working to prevent the world’s poorest nations from producing their own natural gas by lobbying the World Bank to end its financing of natural gas projects in Africa.

The IMF wants to hold hostage $50 billion as part of a “Resilience and Sustainability Trust” that will demand nations give up fossil fuels and thus their chance at developing. Such efforts are working. On Thursday, South Africa received $600 million in “climate loans” from French and German development banks that can only be used for renewables. The Europeans hope to shift the $7.6 billion currently being invested by South Africa in electricity infrastructure away from coal and into renewables.

Celebrities and global leaders say they care about the poor. In 2019, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s wife, told a group of African women, “I am here with you, and I am here FOR you … as a woman of color.” Why, then, are they demanding climate action on their backs?

October 25, 2022

A Multi-Trillion Dollar Pipe Dream

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

PragerU
Published 16 Jun 2022

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.
(more…)

September 17, 2022

In the wake of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Europe’s cold winter looms ahead

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

Andrew Sullivan allows his views on the fighting in Ukraine to be a bit more optimistic after Ukrainian gains in the most recent counter-attacks on Russian-held territory around Kharkiv:

Approximate front-line positions just before the Ukrainian counter-attack east of Kharkiv in early September 2022. The MOD appears to have stopped posting these daily map updates sometime in the last month or so (this is the most recent as of Friday afternoon).

As we were going to press last week — I still don’t know a better web-era phrase for that process — Ukraine mounted its long-awaited initiative to break the military stalemate that had set in after Russia’s initial defeat in attempting a full-scale invasion. The Kharkiv advance was far more successful than anyone seems to have expected, including the Ukrainians. You’ve seen the maps of regained territory, but the psychological impact is surely more profound. Russian morale is in the toilet — and if it seems a bit premature to say that Ukraine will soon “win” the war, it’s harder and harder to see how Russia doesn’t lose it. By any measure, this is a wonderful development — made possible by Ukrainian courage and Western arms.

Does this change my gloomy assessment of Putin’s economic war on Europe, which will gain momentum as the winter drags on? Yes and no. Yes, it will help shore up nervous European governments who can now point to Ukraine’s success to justify the coming energy-driven recession. No, it will not make that recession any less intense or destabilizing. It may make it worse, as Putin lashes out.

More to the point, the Kharkiv euphoria will not last forever. September is not next February. Russia still has plenty of ammunition to throw Ukraine’s way (even if it has to scrounge some from North Korea); it is still occupying close to a fifth of the country; still enjoying record oil revenues; has yet to fully mobilize for a war; and still has China and much of the developing world in (very tepid) acquiescence. Putin is very much at bay. But he is not finished.

Europe’s scramble to prevent mass suffering this winter is made up of beefing up reserves (now 84 percent full, ahead of schedule), energy rationing, government pledges to cut gas and electricity use, nationalization of gas companies, and billions in aid to consumers and industry, with some of the money recouped by windfall taxes on energy suppliers. The record recently is cause for optimism:

    The Swedish energy company Vattenfall AB said industrial demand for gas in France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy is down about 15% annually.

But the use of gas by households is trivial in the summer in Europe compared with the winter — and subsidizing the cost doesn’t help conservation. Russia will now cut off all gas — which could send an economy like Italy’s to contract more than 5 percent in one year. There really is no way out of imminent, deep economic distress across the continent. Even countries with minimal dependence on Russia, like Britain, are locked into an energy market with soaring costs.

That will, in turn, strengthen some of the populist-right parties — see Italy and Sweden. The good news is that the new right in Sweden backs NATO, and Italy’s post-liberal darling, Georgia Meloni, who once stanned Putin, “now calls [him] an anti-Western aggressor and said she would ‘totally’ continue to send offensive arms to Ukraine”. The growing evidence of the Russian army’s war crimes — another mass grave was just discovered in Izyum — makes appeasement ever more morally repellent.

So what will Putin do now? That is the question. His military is incapable of recapturing lost territory anytime soon; he is desperate for allies; and mobilizing the entire country carries huge political risks. It’s striking to me that in a new piece, Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian right’s guru, is both apoplectic about the war’s direction and yet still rules out mass conscription:

    Mobilization is inevitable. War affects everyone and everything, but mobilization does not mean forcibly sending conscripts to the front, this can be avoided, for example, by forming a fully-fledged volunteer movement, with the necessary benefits and state support. We must focus on veterans and special support for the Novorossian warriors.

This is weak sauce — especially given Dugin’s view that the West is bent on “a war of annihilation against us — the third world war”. It’s that scenario that could lead to a real and potentially catastrophic escalation — which may be why the German Chancellor remains leery of sending more tanks to Ukraine. The danger is a desperate Putin doing something, well, desperate.

I have no particular insight into intra-Russian arguments over mobilization, but there seems to be zero point (other than for propaganda … and that cuts both ways) to instituting a “Great Patriotic War”-style mass conscription drive at this point. The Russian army could absolutely be boosted to vast numbers through conscription. Vast numbers of untrained, unwilling young people with little military training and no particular passion to save the Rodina this time, despite constant regime callbacks to desperate struggle against Hitler in 1941-45. Pushing under- or untrained troops into battle against a Ukrainian army equipped with relatively modern western weaponry would be little more than deliberate slaughter and I can’t believe even Putin would be that reckless.

September 6, 2022

Add the traditional English pub to the endangered list

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

There is nothing to match the warm, cozy comfort of a proper English pub*, especially on those cold, wet days as evening falls. Traditional pubs have been struggling for some time as British preferences in entertainment, drinking, and dining have become more cosmopolitan over the years. The raw numbers of pubs has declined year-over-year for decades, but it’s looking like the winter of 2022/23 may be the worst time for pubs in living memory:

“The Prospect of Whitby ; Pub London” by Loco Steve is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Simon Pegg’s wise counsel in Shaun of the Dead – “Go to the Winchester, have a nice, cold pint, and wait for all this to blow over” – has long been shared in GIF form whenever a new crisis springs into view.

Chillingly, this time next year, that may no longer be an option. To the Great British pub, the winter energy crisis represents an existential threat. And on the back of two years drifting in purgatory under lockdown, many pubs are facing a war of extermination.

The trade publication for pubs, the Morning Advertiser, makes for especially grim reading at the moment. Its pages are dominated by the energy crisis. It suggests that without urgent government intervention, more than 70 per cent of existing licensed premises will not survive the winter.

One “wet-led” pub – that is, a pub-pub (one that relies on the sale of alcohol to remain viable, rather than on burger stacks and artisan chips served on a slate hubcap) – illustrates this plight all too clearly. Until this summer, it had been paying 14p per electricity unit on a fixed energy contract. But it has now been quoted 83p a unit. It is hard to imagine any cost that could rise so vertically without dealing a mortal blow to a business balanced on the edge of viability. And it’s not as if heating and energy are optional extras during the winter. This is not a thriller, this is a snuff movie.

Pubs have always faced challenges, of course, going right back to the Civil War and the mirthless interregnum. Thanks to Cromwell’s war on harmless pastimes – such as bear-baiting, whoring and dice – you will rarely see him honoured on pub signs in the way you see a Royal Oak or a King’s Arms.

The First World War famously saw the introduction of last orders. This was to keep munitions workers working. It was one of those temporary, emergency measures that, like income tax, proved oddly barbed once in the flesh of the state. As the 20th century wore on, rationing and oil shocks tightened belts. And then, under Thatcher, the rise of restaurants, wine bars and other sub-pub drinking options diffused the economic benefit of those re-loosened belts.

Drink-driving legislation and smoking bans delivered a slow-motion one-two that left many well-established premises, especially in rural locations, reeling. And in the background, the steady drip-drip of anti-drinking propaganda from bodies such as Public Health England (now rebranded as the Health Security Agency) has done its damage, too. The public-health lobby sees drinking only in terms of abuse, while ignoring the social benefits, the knitting-together, the public mental health of England that the public house affords.

* The Scots and the Welsh may have issues with this, but based on my experiences of drinking and dining in pubs in all three countries, it’s the English pub by a country mile. Welsh pubs can be pleasant, but Scottish pubs outside Edinburgh remind me of grim old Ontario bars back when Ontario was still just emerging from the post-Prohibition no-fun-on-Sunday Orange Lodge era (“We’ll let you drink, but you must be made to feel guilty for it!”).

September 27, 2021

Britain’s electricity grid facing the inevitable result of over-dependence on “renewable” generation

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

Peter Hitchens on the grim choices ahead for Britain, as the choice to switch to carbon-free electricity generation has left the country with a less reliable and more expensive grid:

These worrying signs came just after we learned that nothing, apart from luck and prayer, stands between us and a shutdown of our power grid. Our gas reserves are almost gone. We have blown up our coal-fired power stations. We have failed to build new gas-powered plants that should have replaced them. Our ancient nuclear power system is fast wearing out.

So we must rest our hopes on wind that does not always blow and on foreign power that may not arrive when we need it.

Can we even begin to imagine what will happen to us if this all goes wrong? We are far more reliant on electricity than ever before. The computers that govern all we do cannot run on anything else, and if they crash cannot be instantly switched on again.

In response, our allegedly conservative Prime Minister praises the green policies that have created this disaster, and pledges to continue them. And he is applauded for doing so.

We may not be facing The Day Of The Triffids, but we face the Day Of The Nitwits, when 30 years of relentless green zealotry send us spinning into the Third World.

There, we’ll be the only Third World country with a submarine-launched nuclear deterrent – Burkina Faso with rockets, as an old joke about the USSR went.

Once again, I saw this coming. Arguing with the Greta Thunberg lot is like arguing with the Spanish Inquisition. The only thing they want to hear from me is a full confession before they burn me at the stake, using carbon-free fuel.

So rather than contesting their faith, I suggested that our best future lies in non-polluting nuclear power. As long ago as 2006, I urged: “Building nuclear power stations, and making ourselves independent in energy, is at least as important as maintaining a nuclear bomb.” I also pointed out, rather before this was fashionable, that “the Russian threat is to our energy”.

Now, I don’t fantasise about being Prime Minister. The job seems to me to be unrewarding, unhealthy, physically exhausting and surprisingly powerless. But on this occasion I have to say that if I could have seen this in 2006, so could the Government and the Civil Service.

And if serious action had been taken then, we could now have a fleet of modern nuclear power stations that would make us secure in energy, and probably turn us into a power exporter.

Instead, leaders of both parties chose the path of vanity, an unusable Cold War superpower weapon, maintained at impossible cost long after the Cold War ended, and even longer after we ceased to be a superpower.

And they chose the pursuit of green policies – the most all-embracing, dimwit wooden-headed dogma since the death of Communism, without enough sense to take any precautions in case it did not work out.

Update: Link was broken.

September 7, 2021

Fallen Flag — the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad

Filed under: Business, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad by J.W. Swanberg. The New Haven was created in 1872 by a merger between the New York and New Haven Railroad (began operation in 1849) and the Hartford and New Haven Railroad (operations from 1844 onward). The combined entity owned main line track from New York City through its Connecticut namesake cities to Springfield Massachusetts. With its own trackage and lines leased from other New England railways along with steamship companies and local trolley lines, it largely monopolized freight and passenger traffic south of the competing Boston and Albany line. As the Wikipedia entry describes the company’s early growth:

Around the beginning of the 20th century, New York investors led by J. P. Morgan gained control, and in 1903 installed Charles S. Mellen as President. Charles Francis Murphy’s New York Contracting and Trucking company was awarded a $6 million contract in 1904 to build rail lines in the Bronx for the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. An executive at the railroad said the contract was awarded to avoid friction with New York City’s Tammany Hall political machine. In response to this contract, the New York State Legislature amended the city’s charter so that franchise-awarding power was removed from the city council and given to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, which only recently became defunct in 1989. Morgan and Mellen achieved a complete monopoly of transportation in southern New England, purchasing other railroads and steamship and trolley lines. More than 100 independent railroads eventually became part of the system before and during these years, reaching 2,131 miles at its 1929 peak. Substantial improvements to the system were made during the Mellen years, including electrification between New York and New Haven. […] Morgan and Mellen went further and attempted to acquire or neutralize competition from other railroads in New England, including the New York Central’s Boston and Albany Railroad, the Rutland Railroad, the Maine Central Railroad, and the Boston and Maine Railroad. But the Morgan-Mellen expansion left the company overextended and financially weak.

In 1914, 21 directors and ex-directors of the railroad were indicted for “conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce by acquiring the control of practically all the transportation facilities of New England.”

J.W. Swanberg carries on the story of the railroad’s woes during and after the First World War:

The New Haven was a financial powerhouse at the start of the 20th century, but from 1903 to 1913, the road was driven to near bankruptcy under President Charles S. Mellen and financier J.P. Morgan. One gain in this period, though, was control of the Central New England Railway, which included the Hudson River bridge at Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and the link to Maybrook and nearby Campbell Hall. This was New Haven’s gateway to the west, also served by trunk lines Erie; New York, Ontario & Western; and bridge lines Lehigh & Hudson River and Lehigh & New England.

World War I government control and the Roaring 1920s boom times saved the New Haven, but not enough to survive the Great Depression, and bankruptcy came in 1935. World War II traffic allowed recovery and rebuilding, but soon all was lost by mismanagement and bankruptcy came again in 1961. The postwar New Haven faced not only highway and airline competition but also the almost total erosion of New England’s heavy industrial base. Just a shell of the once-mighty railroad was forced into a reluctant Penn Central on Jan. 1, 1969.

One of the line’s claim to fame was the early electrification program the New Haven embarked on in 1907:

“View of Typical Sectionalizing Bridge, Auto-Transformer Installation and Cable Runway May 2, 1914.”
Photo and original caption from Electric Railway Journal via Wikimedia Commons.

The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad pioneered electrification of main line railroads using high-voltage, alternating current, single-phase overhead catenary. It electrified its mainline between Stamford, Connecticut, and Woodlawn, New York, in 1907, and extended the electrification to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1914. While single-phase AC railroad electrification has become commonplace, the New Haven’s system was unprecedented at the time of construction. The significance of this electrification was recognized in 1982 by its designation as a National Historic Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

[…]

The New Haven’s system was extended across the Hell Gate Bridge to the New York Connecting Railroad upon the line’s construction. The system of electrification was an extension of the New Haven’s revised 11/22 kV autotransformer architecture. The original electrification extended from the New Haven’s main line, across the Hell Gate Bridge, to the Bay Ridge yard. The line south of Bowery Bay Junction was de-electrified in the 1950s. The line between New Rochelle and the Harold Interlocking was transferred to Amtrak in 1976 upon dissolution of Penn Central. The electrification system continued to be controlled as a portion of the ex-New Haven system until the 1987 conversion to 60 Hz operation.

When the New Haven main line was converted by Metro-North to 60 Hz operation, the Amtrak Hell Gate line was also converted, but as an isolated system powered from the Van Nest substation. Control of the catenary system was transferred from Cos Cob to the Load Dispatcher at New York Penn Station. Although conversion occurred subsequent to the PRR-era electrification, Amtrak substation numbers 45-47 were assigned for consistency with the rest of the PRR numbering scheme.

New Haven dual-power diesel-electric FL9 locomotive 2011 with train #138, a NYC – Pittsfield train, at South Norwalk, CT on October 13, 1968. The stub of the former branch to the docks is in the foreground.
Photo by Roger Puta via Wikimedia Commons.

September 6, 2021

Why the British Rail Modernisation Plan Failed

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

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 27 Feb 2021

Hello again! 😀

Back to trains, and for this week we discuss one of Britain’s most audacious but ultimately futile projects to revitalise the network in the wake of World War II. However, rather than undertaking a comprehensive rebuild of the network, British Railways was short-changed time and again, ultimately resulting in a facelifted but largely unchanged system that dated back to the Victorian era, though it was much smaller and crippled by far more debt than ever before.

This video was actually a suggestion from an American viewer, who was curious as to why British Rail had such a vast array of diesel locomotives during its early years. 🙂

All video content and images in this production have been provided with permission wherever possible. While I endeavour to ensure that all accreditations properly name the original creator, some of my sources do not list them as they are usually provided by other, unrelated YouTubers. Therefore, if I have mistakenly put the accreditation of “Unknown”, and you are aware of the original creator, please send me a personal message at my Gmail (this is more effective than comments as I am often unable to read all of them): rorymacveigh@gmail.com

The views and opinions expressed in this video are my personal appraisal and are not the views and opinions of any of these individuals or bodies who have kindly supplied me with footage and images.

If you enjoyed this video, why not leave a like, and consider subscribing for more great content coming soon.

Thanks again, everyone, and enjoy! 😀

References:
– Railways Archive (and their respective sources)
– RMWeb (and their respective sources)
– Wikipedia (and its respective references)

August 26, 2021

A New World Order? – The World Power Conference | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.24 Summer 1924

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Europe, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 25 Aug 2021

The League of Nations is just one manifestation of a broader ideal in the interwar years. Within a palace in the heart of the British Empire, a new conference is underway. It is attended by everyone from H.G. Wells to the Prince of Wales.
(more…)

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