Huh. I predicted the Republican landslide in 2010 a year before

A port from ten years ago, but evergreen today.  I guess that ten years of losing hasn't wised up the Democrats.

Maladapted

This man is a priest. He has faith, and makes personal sacrifices - financial and family, especially - in service to his calling. He gives of himself, for the benefit of others. The danger is compromising himself in service not of his faith, but of an establishment who looks to him to prop up a political and social structure.

Bad things have sometimes come from this, like the Albigensian Crusade, where maybe 100,000 people were put to the sword.  Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.  Kill them all. The Lord will know his own.

This man is, in a sense, also a priest. He also has faith, that the universe is intelligible to the human mind. He also often makes sacrifices - those scientists doing theoretical (as opposed to applied) research often make much less than their applied compatriots.

The danger to him is the same as to the other sort of priest - compromising his principles in support of an establishment looking to him to prop up the political establishment.

Bad things sometimes come from this, too. Like Eugenics. There's more than a casual sense that the theory of Man-made climate change is another.

What happens when you base your decisions on a shaky premise? More or less what you'd expect:

A recent industry study into the UK energy sector of 2030 - which according to government plans will use a hugely increased amount of wind power - suggests that massive electricity price rises will be required, and some form of additional government action in order to avoid power cuts. This could have a negative impact on plans for electrification of transport and domestic energy use.

Seems that wind power costs more - a lot more - than fossil fuels. This is why most electricity is generated by burning coal. Wind power will cost more, and that cost will be paid by someone. Ah, no matter, say the political establishment. After all, Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius:

... last Thursday, Anglesey Aluminium, the biggest consumer of electricity in Wales, announced that it would cease production, precisely because it could see no prospect of signing up to a long-term supply of electricity at a rate at which it could make a profit. And on the day of Miliband’s announcement, a group of Labour MPs presented a “Save Our Steel” petition, saying: “We need to make sure we act before the light goes out.” It may well be that the English steel mills will become unable to compete globally, even at current domestic energy prices; but deliberately to make them uncompetitive is industrial vandalism ...

This is a very interesting article, because of a particular juxtaposition made by the author, Dominic Lawson. He cites all sorts of numbers on the cost and (lack of) effectiveness of current green initiatives on one hand, and the moral posturing of the political establishment on the other:

Miliband’s citing of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in support of his policy of subsidising the construction of many thousands of otherwise uneconomic wind turbines might appear grotesque, even comical; but not if you genuinely believe that Britain’s switching from coal to wind power for its electricity generation will save the lives of countless Africans. 
I have no idea whether Miliband truly believes that it will - but if he does, he is deluded. The UK is responsible for less than 2% of global carbon emissions - a figure set to fall sharply, regardless of what we do, as a result of the startlingly rapid industrial-isation of countries such as China and India: each year the increase in Chinese CO2 emissions alone is greater than those produced by the entire British economy. On the fashionable assumption that climate change is entirely driven by CO2 emissions, the effect on global temperatures of Britain closing every fossil fuel power station would be much smaller than the statistical margin of error: in effect, zero. 

Never mind that the numbers don't - and can't - work. Never mind that the data justifying action is suspicious. Action must be taken, and taken now, and never mind the consequences. They won't (much) fall on Oxford and Cambridge, but rather on Leeds and Wales (Detroit and West Virgina, to my American readers). And who really cares about them, any way?  Caedite eos.

Interestingly, this isn't new - we've seen what happens when this sort of Kulturkampf economic policy is done over the course of a couple or three decades:

Today two principles now drive the political economy of the blue states—and so shape the Obama administration today. The first one is the relentless expansion of public sector employment and political power. Although traditional progressives such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Fiorello La Guardia, and Pat Brown built up government employment, they never contemplated the growth of public employee unions that have emerged so powerfully since the 1960s.

[snip]

The only way to pay for these expenditures rests on the second key blue economic principle—the notion of an ever expanding high-end “creative economy.” This conceit is based on the notion that tangible things matter little and that, as former Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly put it, “communication is the economy.”

[snip]

Since [the "creative"] class had less need than traditional industries for basic infrastructure, a confluence of interest has emerged between the post-industrial elites and the public employees. Money raised from the monied post-industrial elite would essentially buy social peace by funneling largess not into improving the roads, subways, or ports but into the pockets of the public employees.

What's the downside to the Intellectual elites if energy prices double? They can afford another $100 a month, and their jobs are safe. Joe the Blue Collar steelworker?  We'll have to do up a government skills training program for him, like Data Entry or something. And anyway, we really don't like all those grubby factories and smokestacks, anyway. Let China do that, a long, long way away. And we'll need more Chinese linguists then; every cloud has a silver lining and all that, what?

I've said many times that I think that the Republican Party is the Stupid Party. The poverty of intellect on display there is nothing short of astonishing. So to make the 2010 elections a little more interesting, here's the key to a massive win for them:

It's all about what the Democrats will do to the pocketbook of Blue Collar America, stupid.

The Democrats are in the pocket of the radical environmental movement, so this is a target-rich environment. Expect higher gas taxes? Tons of Democratic Party proposals. Higher electricity bills? Cap and Trade. Mileage standards that add hundreds of dollars to the price of a car? Cigarettes? Alcohol? Trans-fat? Take your pick of what's already been done to Blue Collar America.

There's no tax cut, no government program that the Democrats can promise that would add up anything close to the thousands of dollars a year that Joe Blue Collar pays right now.

Add up the number, and talk about it. And keep talking about it. And point out what the number will be when Health Care is run from the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Democratic Party coalition is massively mal-adapted to survive in that environment - all they know is how to mouth pious platitudes about the working man, while keeping the real message to themselves.  Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

I'd say "you're welcome", but this is. after all, the Stupid Party.

"Green" energy is destroying the environment

Windmills kill far more wildlife than has been previously reported:

“There is strong evidence that many insect populations are under serious threat and are declining in many places across the globe,” notes Extinction Rebellion. “A 27-year long population monitoring study in Germany revealed a dramatic 76% decline in flying insect biomass.”

What Extinction Rebellion does not mention is that scientists in Germany say wind turbines appear to be contributing significantly to what it calls the “insect die-off.”

Germany’s leading technology assessment research institute published a study last October concluding that the rapid expansion of wind farms threatens insect populations.

Dr. Franz Trieb of the Institute of Engineering Thermodynamics concludes that a "rough but conservative estimate of the impact of wind farms on flying insects in Germany" is a “loss of about 1.2 trillion insects of different species per year” which “could be relevant for population stability.”

It seems that this hammer of Green Doom falls most strongly on migrating insect populations (i.e. kills breeding populations).  OK, but it's just insects, right?

“Wind energy facilities kill a significant number of bats far exceeding any documented natural or human-caused sources of mortality in the affected species,” writes Cryan.

Cryan is emphatic on this point. “There are no other well-documented threats to populations of migratory tree bats that cause mortality of similar magnitude to that observed at wind turbines.”  

Another leading bat expert, Patricia Brown, agrees. More than a decade ago she warned California energy regulators that wind turbines could be the “nail in the coffin” for some migratory bat species.

But bats are icky, right.  No biggie.

Wind turbines have also emerged as one of the greatest human threats to many species of large, threatened and high-conservation value birds, after habitat loss from agriculture. 

Wind energy threatens golden eagles, bald eagles, burrowing owls, red-tailed hawks, Swainson’s hawks, American kestrels, white-tailed kites, peregrine falcons, and prairie falcons, among many others. 

The expansion of wind turbines could result in the extinction of the golden eagle in the western United States, where its population is at an unsustainably low level. 

Any additional mortalities to the golden eagle threatens the species with extinction, scientists with US Fish and Wildlife warned 10 years ago, before the last decade’s massive expansion of wind farms.

Oh, damnitall.  How come we haven't been hearing this?

Aren’t bats protected from wind turbines by government agencies enforcing the Endangered Species Act and other conservation laws? They're not.

“None of the migratory bats known to be most affected by wind turbines are protected by conservation laws,” writes Cryan, “nor is there a legal mandate driving research into the problem or implementation of potential solutions.” 

No research funding?  Hmmmm.

Where government agencies routinely require permits for development near wetlands, in order to protect bird species, they rarely require the same for wind farms, even though the wildlife impacts can be far greater.   

Nor do governments require that wind developers disclose when they kill birds and bats, or count the dead. Wind developers have even sued to prevent the public from accessing data about bird kills.  

Incredibly, wind developers are allowed to self-report violations of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

The data are self-reported by interested parties, not by scientists?  Hmmmm.

Environmental journalists deserve a significant amount of blame for suggesting the problem is either small or has been solved. “Wind farm works to reduce eagle deaths from old turbines,” reads the headline of a PBS Newshour story that typifies journalistic bias.  

But greater responsibility for the threatened extinction of birds and bats lies with environmentalists who promote wind energy as good for the environment.  

Against the best-available science, Sierra Club claims that “the toll from turbines is far from a major cause of bird mortality.” 

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) recently endorsed a massive expansion of wind turbines on the Great Lakes against the opposition from local wildlife experts, birders, and conservationists, who note that the lakes are one of the world’s most important sanctuaries to many migratory bird species.

Environmentalists sweeping environmental impacts under the rug?  Hmmmm.

What gives with all this?  These people are acting in precisely the opposite manner than you would expect.  Why?



Remember this commercial?  It used to be on the Sunday talking heads shows in the 1990s.  That's T. Boone Pickens, modern industrial Robber Barron.  Why is he pushing wind power, which is a lot more expensive than goal or gas.  What's his deal?  Why was he pushing wind power so much?

Subsidies:

It gets lots more complicated when you consider that the wind farms are being subsidized by the government with the Production Tax Credit (PTC). A tax credit should not be confused with a tax deduction. A deduction reduces the amount of income you pay taxes on. is paying taxes on. A credit is money back. And the PTC is a “Refundable Tax Credit” which means the company does not just get to pay fewer taxes but actually gets paid by the government even if it does not owe any taxes.

The PTC subsidy has been in effect now for 27 years. Congress has adjusted the PTC many times through the years but today the subsidy is about $.02/kWhr. So, the power company gets money back in the form of a subsidy for roughly 67% of what they produce – i.e., the company gets money back to the tune of $.02/kWhr after it sells the electricity for $.03/kWhr. If the company sells $3 million of electricity they get the $3 million plus a PTC subsidy of $2 million. That is a huge subsidy! In fact, I think it is the biggest subsidy ever given for anything.

T. Boone Pickens and Warren Buffett both have huge investments in these things and both have openly said that wind farms would not be economic without the PTC.

(There's a lot of information at that link and you should definitely RTWT.  It's actually much worse than this)

So the Robber Barons are driven by fithy lucre, in the form of sweet, sweet "green" subsidies which inflate the value of the investment by 2/3.  What are the chances that Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club get a lot of donations from corporate foundations?

Hmmmm.  At this point I'm thinking about how Lenin called liberal supporters "Useful Idiots" and thinking about the rank and file environmentalists.  Most of these folks seem like people, and not the sort to be used as tools by the likes of T. Boone Pickens.

Hmmmm.  It's not easy being green.

Note: the picture of the dead eagle is from savetheeaglesinternational.org.  They have a lot more about this.

The end of Big Oil

And Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia:

“Fracking” plays (Oil Speak Note: Play = producing oil well) are normally for four years, with most of the oil in the first two years. They cost $10 to $15 million. They are profitable at $50 a barrel for a new play and already fracked wells cover their costs at half that price. The “new revolution” technique the oil service firm mentioned doubles those times to four years of high flow with a further four years of declining flow. Depending on whatever drilling costs are involved, this effectively earns them profit at a price as low as 1/2 of the per barrel cost of previously fracked wells over the new well’s longer productive lifetime.

A Big Oil drilling play in the deep ocean, arctic, or politically unstable/corrupt 3rd World nation (This now includes Putin’s Russia) runs between $1 and $5 billion because of all the infrastructure Big Oil has to build to extract and move the large quantities of oil from howling wilderness at the edge of civilization. They run 7 to 15 years.

The disinvestment that this Saudi-caused oil price crash is bringing on will see declines by corruption of existing big-oil-type production in various national oil companies, followed by a massive market share shift to fracking when the reduced-by-disinvestment Big Oil production curves start bumping reduced oil supply into increased oil demand.

CONFIRMING FRACKING IMPRESSIONS
These facts left me with several impressions that I later confirmed.

First, this new extended frack technology is what is driving the “Fracking to Frack-log” drilling decline by the mid-to-large oil industry players in the last 9 to 12 months. Effectively, mid-to-large fracking firms have stopping current style fracking to get a piece of the new technique for the next oil price rise, AKA when the Saudis have burned through their foreign investments and sovereign-debt credit rating.

Second, cheap fracking-type drilling also moves all future oil extraction to places that have certain legal and regulatory regimes for quick market moves. Places like private lands in Texas and other traditional American oil states that have existing transportation infrastructure, laws and regulations for land use plus a stable & (relatively) honest political culture adapted to running them.

And also, the Big Green environmental movement:

Big Green has a March-of-Dimes-after-the-Salk-Polio-vaccine problem. 

The environmental movement arose in part due to real and imaginary environmental abuses of Big Oil, notably its huge infrastructure requirements generating “Not in my back yard” (NIMBY) resistance in many American states. The size and scope of these infrastructure programs required multiple levels of local, state and federal regulatory approval which allowed protracted opposing environmental lobbying and media campaigns. Those campaigns required huge standing organizations, raising and spending money on political lobbying and public education/awareness. This in turn created huge INCOME STREAMS with a familiar pattern of fund-raising consultants getting a percentage of the take, plus ditto for related lobbyist and publicity staff, all of whose livelihoods and identities are wrapped up in environmentalist political action. Big Green is merely one of, albeit now the largest, of many such self-licking ice cream cone institutions in America.

If most of the new production is on private land and transported/refined in existing infrastructure, then this is a big, big problem for all the Green mouthes that are used to eating high off the hog today.

Left unstated is whether a successful effort by Big Green to stifle a Texas-only economic development might spur talk of secession.

This is a very interesting article.

Save the planet - pave the rain forests

Heh:

There is new, direct, observational evidence that the most effective thing we could do to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere is pave over the tropical rainforests.


Don’t believe me? Look at this map of CO2 emissions by region. It’s brand-new data from NASA’s just-lofted Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

Hey, you don't want to be a Science Denier, do you?  Well, do you, punk?

Environmental Science: reduced carbon emissions are actually increased carbon emissions

One of the benefits of fracking has been a substantial reduction in the cost of natural gas.  This has caused a lot of coal fired electric generating plants to shift to natural gas which has substantially reduced carbon emissions.  Now I don't much buy into the whole ZOMG Greenhouse Gasses are killing teh childrenz thing, but you'd think that people who do believe this would think that this shift would be A Very Good Thing Indeed.

Alas, no.  Because cheaper energy leads to increased energy use which leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions.  Because Science!

A new study published in Nature has revealed that switching to cheap Natural Gas will not reduce CO2 significantly, because all that cheap energy will stimulate the economy so much that we will all use more energy.

According to the abstract;

If these advanced gas production technologies were to be deployed globally, the energy market could see a large influx of economically competitive unconventional gas resources. The climate implications of such abundant natural gas have been hotly debated. ... Here we show that market-driven increases in global supplies of unconventional natural gas do not discernibly reduce the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions or climate forcing. Our results, based on simulations from five state-of-the-art integrated assessment models of energy–economy–climate systems independently forced by an abundant gas scenario, project large additional natural gas consumption of up to +170 per cent by 2050.

Because computer models say so. 

And so we see that the Environment Science establishment is not interested in reducing impacts, it is interested in ending economic growth.  OK, then. How many children and elderly must freeze in the dark to satisfy the computer models?  The World wonders ...

Tab clearing

Ever wonder what happens to all the recycling you so dutifully do?  Most of it gets dumped.

Gasoline sales are not down to 1970s levels.  They are down 10% from the peak 10 years ago.

What does the greatest living scientist think about Global Warming?  Choice quote: “I just think they don’t understand the climate. Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”

Is al-Qaeda finished?

The best blog name ever?

What is the real plot of Cinderella?  Perhaps that's better asked what's the RealPolitik plot?

There's been a 10x increase in the number of euthanasias performed in Belgium in the last decade.  I have to confess that I feel torn here.  On the one hand, my belief is that you have the absolute right to suicide (generally a bad idea, but the right exists).  On the other hand, it's unclear what this right means to, say, and Alzheimer's.  If you bump gramps off with a pillow over his face, you're a felon.  If the National Health Service does it, you inherit.  Unsavory.

Must read post for Preppers

The world has plenty of food.  It has distribution problems (Stalin's famine in the Ukraine), but it seems that we currently grow enough cereal grains to feed upward of 14 Billion people (just wheat and corn would feed almost 9 Billion).  And new intensified cultivation techniques would let rice alone feed 14 Billion more (!).

Of course, people in all cultures prefer to eat meat, and so the vast majority of all of this goes into animal feed.  What's interesting about this is in scenarios of collapse - wide spread, prolonged drought, for example - there's a huge amount of resiliency in the planetary food production system.  Yes, there would be fewer cattle, pigs, and chickens, but there would still be plenty of food to go around (baring distribution breakdown, when things would get ugly).

There's a very interesting post that describes the cereal grain types, where they grow, and what we do with them.  But the doomsday scenarios of the Population Bomb crowd are entirely wrong:

So this is a pretty happy note. We can feed the world a couple of times over as things stand today. With some modest effort, we can quadruple that. Anyone who is not fully fed is hungry due to the choices of people about what kinds of food they prefer and political decisions about power and greed. We can simply change our choices and feed everyone.

Furthermore, we have in hand plenty of methods to increase productivity for a couple of more doubles of population. All without “meatless days” or any kind of deprivation.

Of more interest to most readers here (and I'd dare say to all Preppers) is the breakdown by cereal variety - what it's good for, where it's good, how people use it.  For example, Rye:

So another cold and crappy soil tolerant crop, being displaced by other crops that pay better or can be made to grow with enough added fertilizers. Yield is about 6 tons / acre, so about 12,000 person-days of grain per acre. 32 people can have subsistence rations for a year off of one acre. An “8 to the acre” small urban home lot would feed 4 people. Yet we plant those lots with ‘rye grass lawns’ and throw away the ‘forage’ we mow…

If you're interested in backyard gardening and maybe putting away some seeds "just in case", then this is a post you should bookmark.  The news is good - great, really: we can feed everyone on the planet, likely as well (or nearly as well) as those of us in the West eat.  But this also gives the production system tremendous resiliency for hard times, and that resiliency scales down to quarter acre plots.

Me, I'd like to put away some Golden Rice seeds for "just in case".  Vitamin A FTW.

RTWT.

In which I get my tinfoil hat on

Long time readers know that it's not often that I don my Wookie Suit and hit the low crawl down the slit trench.  But this makes my skin crawl, because it's horrifyingly plausible. No, it's not about guns.  It's about electric cars.  With the bankruptcies going through the automotive and "Green" power industries, you know what's some of the most valuable assets for liquidation?

Patents.  Thar's Intellectual Property in them thar hills.

And guess who's buying up all the patents for anything related to electric car power plants?  The oil companies.

I see you rolling your eyes, and just stop it.  If you really think it through it makes sense:

If you buy an electric car, what happens?  You end up tooling down the road in an electric car.

If you tool down the road in a fully electric ride what happens?  You look like a dork.

This is just your wiser big brother Exxon-Mobil watching out for you.  You'll thank him some day.

Choices

Here's something that you don't hear much of amid the current well-organized ZOMG Thermageddon press blitz: the developing world cannot afford the pie-in-the-sky "renewable" energy sources so loved by Progressives.  How do we know this?  The developing world can't even afford cheap coal electricity:

We do not label those who live on $1 per day as having "economic access" -- rather they are desperately poor, living just above the poverty line. Everyone understands that $1 a day is not much. Very few people get that 100 kWh per year is a pitifully small amount of energy. Therefore, I suggest that we start talking in terms of  "energy poverty" measured as a percentage of the average American (or European or Japanese or Australian or whatever energy rich context you'd prefer as a baseline, the results will be qualitatively the same). To use the IEA numbers, one would be in "energy poverty" with access to less than 2% of the energy access enjoyed by those in the rich world.

It is bad enough that the energy poor are largely ignored in our rich world debates over issues like climate change. It is perhaps even worse that our "success stories" often mean creating scenarios where the energy poor attain just 2% of the access to energy that we enjoy on a daily basis. The frustrating irony of course is that the issues that rich world environmentalists most seem to care about might be best addressed by putting energy poverty first, but that is a subject for another time.

There are 1.3 billion people who have no electricity at all, and to Progressives they are invisible.  Give these people a quarter as much electricity as we have - a pathetically low goal, to be sure - and you've just added the equivalent of the United States' greenhouse gas emissions to the environment.  That shocked gasp you just heard is from Progressives everywhere.  Can't have poor people aspiring to things like electric lighting, air conditioning, and computers with Internet access.

Choose, progs.  You can have your SWPL environmentalism or you can help a billion people get out of grinding poverty.  Pick one.

Environmentalism as a signalling device

It can't be realistic policy - that requires a suspension of disbelief of epic proportions - and so the new World Wildlife Fund report can only be posturing among environmentalists.  Certainly no western government can even begin to implement its proposals:

Analysis Extremist green campaigning group WWF - endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency - has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now.

...

But then we get onto the big stuff. First up, there must be an "immediate focus" on "drastically shrinking the ecological footprint of high income populations".

That means you, Reg reader: you are to accept a massively lower standard of living, in order to reduce your "footprint" to match your nation's "biocapacity". Then you'll have to take another cut, because your nation - being rich - has more "biocapacity" than a poor country does (despite their claim that planetary resources are finite, WWF acknowledges that new "biocapacity" can be created in the form of cropland, forests etc), but this should be shared with the poorer lands under "equitable resource governance".

That means less heating when it's cold - no cooling at all, probably, when it's hot. It means sharply limited hot water: so dirtier clothes, dirtier bedding and a dirtier you - which will be nice as you will also have to live in a smaller home and travel almost exclusively on crowded buses or trains along with similar smelly fellow eco-citizens. Food will be scarcer and realistically much less nutritious (milk for kids will be a luxury, let alone meat, fruit, coffee, that sort of stuff. Get ready to eat a lot of turnips, if you're a Brit.)

Want proof that these policy proposals cannot be implemented?  OK, here you go:

Yet incoming socialist president François Hollande claimed after his victory over Nicolas Sarkozy that he would bring an end to this mythical austerity: “We will bring back Europe on a track for jobs, growth and the future… We’re no longer doomed to austerity.”

This is just a willful, purposeful distortion. What the heck is he talking about? Certainly not France.

If not France, then where?

In Italy and Spain, which have been dependent on tens of billions of cash infusions from the European Central Bank (ECB) to refinance their debts, cuts are hardly anywhere to be found either. In Spain, spending was cut by just €11 billion in 2011, a mere 2.3 percent reduction. In Italy, spending actually increased by €4.3 billion.
Both countries borrowed an additional €117 billion last year alone, raising their combined debts to €1.939 trillion. So, no austerity there. Just debt slaves.

It's dumbfounding to watch the environmental movement in action, as they become increasingly divorced from reality.  It's like nobles in the ancien régime, knowing that something was different but never talking to anyone who might know just why.  Bloody commoners - glad nobody invites them to our parties.  And so, the collapse.

The media echo chamber seems very damaging to the entire environmental movement here, as does the (so far very successful) fundraising strategy of dialing the fear up to eleventy.  While that brings in perhaps a Billion dollars a year to the WWF machine, it's divorced from reality.

The whole spectacle is rather sad, really.  A once noble cause has become the crazy guy in the intersection, shouting about the end of the world.

Can someone please explain to me how Progressives are smarter than I am?

This is what I think Earth Hour looks like:

A little creepy when you call me a Thought Criminal because I'm using this picture, isn't it?  And it seems that Rocket Scientists are now sadly lacking in the brains department here, too:

Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers will turn off lights on the International Space Station.

And that will save exactly HOW much atmospheric CO₂?

Hope the idiocy makes the lefties feel good about themselves.

Australia votes themselves out of their mess

Well, Queensland (one of the most populous states in Oz) just did:

Labor has been reduced to only a handful of seats, with the ABC election computer putting the LNP on track to win an amazing 78 seats in the 89-seat parliament.

Labour lost 45 of their 52 seats in the State Parliament.  And this bit is particularly delicious:

10:40pm: Almost an entire generation of potential Labor leaders were among those swept away by the LNP. Click here to see who stays and who goes.

I'm not an expert on the Australian political system, but this may drop them below the point where they can participate in governmental functions (ministries, etc), putting them on par with parties like the Greens and the Monster Raving Loonies.  It seems like a record loss down under.

And it's driven by voter rage over Labour's Carbon tax and higher petrol prices.  Labour has gone from controlling the Parliaments of all 7 Oz States to losing the 4 largest (population-wise).  Come the next general election, Labour may join the Whigs.

But hey, at least they got to enjoy ramming their philosophy down the voters' throats.  Good on ya, Cobbers, returning the favor.

Substance

This is the real deal.



Newt said a while back that there were ideas that are as clear as 2 + 2 = 4.  This is one of those, as simple and compelling as I've heard from a politician in a long, long time.  Legal Insurrection said that Newt filmed it in one take, with no notes or teleprompter - just a step-by-step assembly of logic that is basically irrefutable.

It's long - almost 30 minutes - but this is big, important stuff.

Save the Polar Bears!

Do it for teh Childrenz™.

What's bad for wind power?

The wind:

The turbine in a North Ayrshire wind farm caught fire on Thursday afternoon as storms hit the country.

...

A wind turbine went up in flames as gust of up to 160mph battered parts of Scotland.

The turbine in a North Ayrshire wind farm caught fire on Thursday afternoon.

Fire engines attended the blaze which died out after a matter of minutes at the wind farm situated above Ardrossan at around 3.40pm.

I'm not making this up, you know.

You there in the back - stop giggling.  These are all Very Smart People™ who know what they're doing.

(via)

What is a location where nature makes wind power impractical?

It's not what you might think.  As budgets all across the EU come under pressure from the creaking sovereign debt train wreck unfolding there, governments are slashing subsidies to wind farms.

Even in the Netherlands, home to many picturesque and historical windmills.

The problem is that the windmills are picturesque and historical because they were all replaced 150 years ago by cheaper energy sources.  Coal fired steam engines at first, and then coal fired electrical generators.  The current Green philosophy is that carbon energy sources need to be replaced with "sustainable" power.  There's just one little catch with that whole "sustainability" thing:

Towering over the waves of the North Sea like an army of giants, blades whipping through the wind, the turbines were the country's best hope to curb carbon emissions and meet growing demand for electricity.

The 36 turbines -- each one the height of a 30-storey building -- produce enough electricity to meet the needs of more than 100,000 households each year.

But five years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour -- some 4.5 billion euros last year.

Now €4.5B may not sound like a lot, in this day of Trillion dollar deficits.  But let me put that in perspective: the population of the Netherlands is about 16.5 Million people, or about one twentieth of the population of the USA.  So that €4.5 is the equivalent of $100B here Stateside.  For wind power subsidies.

Just by itself.

That's what Greens mean by "sustainability" - massive subsidies shifting wealth from poor people (in the form of higher electricity prices) to wealthy, politically connected corporations like GE.

In the name of "social justice", of course.

And the punch line is that this is happening at ground zero for wind power.  I mean, it's not like we don't know that the wind can drive the Dutch economy or something.  It's like the reverse of Sinatra's song: if you can't make it there, you can't make it anywhere.

But don't you forget, the people proposing these policies are smarter and nicer than you or I.

A Civilization Starter Kit on a DVD

Wow:



The Global Village Construction Set is Open Source designs for the 50 industrial machines needed to make a civilization.  They have eight completed so far:

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set - a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world.

While some of these machines are agricultural - Tractor, Hay Cutter, Bailer - others are industrial: Aluminum Extractor (from clay), Dimensional Sawmill, Metal Roller Mill.  I'm not sure that this is an exhaustive list of machinery you'd need for civilization (chemical processing and pharmaceuticals are notable in their absence), this seems a damned fine start.

Best of all, the machines are designed to meet industry specs while being inexpensive and locally built and maintained.


LifeTrac All Terrain Tracks - Fab and Assembly from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.



If you believe that the problem facing the world today is too much centralization and not enough local autonomy and control, this is revolutionary.  And I mean "revolutionary" in a Jeffersonian sense.  Gunsmithing seems a natural addition.

Wow. 

Via Al Fin, so you know that it's wicked smart and entirely cool.

OK, I'm in

Me, I don't hate women or gays.  Or native peoples.  Or the environment.

I'm all over this Ethical Oil idea like stink on a dog.  They have a permanent, free blog ad on the right sidebar*.  I recommend that you add them to your blog.

Lefties, this is your time to shine.  You can support a brutal Saudi dictatorship that kills homosexuals, doesn't care if it destroys the environment, and keeps women as second class citizens.

Or you can send your money to Canada to buy the same thing.  They don't do any of these things.

To be explicit, if you object, then you are objectively misogynist, gay bashing, and Gaia raping.  Srlsy.  You know That Guy who's like this?  Don't be That Guy.

Via Flares into Darkness, who has must-read background on this situation.

* Note to FTC: Free as in speech, not free as in beer.

Note [2] to FTC: Look it up.

Note [3] to FTC: While you're at it, look up the First Amendment.

Note [4] to FTC: While you're at it, get a real job you leeches.

Why do environmentalists hate the environment?

I mean, clear cutting old forest in Vermont?

Some well spoken and well meaning opposition to a wind power project in northeastern Vermont today in the New York Times. At issue is whether the clean electricity that would be generated from Kingdom Community Wind project in Lowell, and its planned 21 turbines totaling 63 MW, stretched across 3 miles of ridgeline, is enough of an environmental benefit to offset the environmental impact of building it.

...

This discussion of the appropriateness of any development in sensitive environmental areas for clean power is certainly a widespread one--Earth First! has protested wind power projects in the Maine wilderness, there's been well-publicized protest of planned solar power plants in sensitive areas of California, and don't forget the opposition to Cape Wind. It's bound to be a growing one too, and one which requires some hard situational thinking. On different projects I personally come down on different sides of the issue.

In this case, it's quite true that development of wind power projects along Vermont's iconic Green Mountain ridges will seriously change the landscape.

Gee, ya think?

Here's a thought for the folks over at Tree Hugger: T. Boone Pickens is on the side of the windmills.  Have you thought what the corporate connections might be?  Hint: corporate profit is involved.

Me, I don't actually have a problem with corporate profit.  Taxing the poor and middle class to subsidize corporate boondoggles that require raping the pristine wilderness so that the middle classes and poor can pay higher electricity bills?  Yeah, I have a problem with that.

But then, I'm a 1970s style leftie, one who thinks that our governmental policies shouldn't hurt the poor or the environment.  I guess that these days, that makes me a wingnut.

We had to destroy the Environment to save it

The Oz.Gov is fixin' to shoot feral camels.  Is it because they're an imported, invasive fauna (like rabbits)?  Nope.  It's for the carbon offsets.

The methodology involves the removal of feral camels with the emissions reduction benefit based on the difference between the estimated age of the animal at removal and the predicted average age of natural mortality.

Ya see, when they kill the camel, it stops breathing.  No more Carbon Dioxide, err, "venting" into the atmosphere.  The Oz.Gov scores some sweet, sweet carbon offsets.

You can't make this up.  As a suggestion for even more carbon offset opportunity, might I suggest that the Oz.Gov expand it's cull to include Australian MPs who voted for the whole idiotic thing in the first place?  Sadly, there are likely more of them than feral camels.  Add this to the list of idiotic "solutions" to global warming, joining starving children, killing pets, and ripping up grass.

Seriously, can all "Progressives" please just knock it off with the whole "we're so smarter than you lot" nonsense?  Shut up and sit down in the back of the room; grownups are talking.