Requiem For Afghanistan

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  • In the Archive section of this blog, I actually created a tag for Afghanistan. There are four posts under that heading, the first one on July 1, 2017, and the most recent on December 22, 2019.

  • Thinking I might write something about the subject today, I went back and looked over those posts. The truth is that I don’t have much to say that I didn’t already say in one or another of those posts.

  • So most of this post will consist of excerpts from those earlier posts.

  • But think of Afghanistan as the perfect metaphor for the main theme of this blog, which is the absurdity of a highly-credentialed American elite that thinks it can solve all human problems and bring the world to an egalitarian progressive utopia through unfettered access to the infinite resources of the American taxpayer. This one small piece of the grand enterprise has just fallen to pieces. The rest of the grand enterprise continues. It too will eventually suffer the same fate, but the process could take a long time.

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Another Round Of Anti-Science From The IPCC

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Another Round Of Anti-Science From The IPCC

  • What with the ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan and the earthquake in Haiti, among other news, you may have failed to notice that the IPCC came out on Monday with substantial parts of its long-awaited Sixth Assessment Report on the state of the world’s climate.

  • This is the first such assessment issued by the IPCC since 2014. The most important piece is the so-called “Summary for Policymakers,” (SPM) ,a 41 page section that is the only part that anyone ever reads.

  • The IPCC attempts to cloak itself in the mantle of “science,” but its real mission is to attempt to scare the bejeezus out of everyone to get the world to cede more power to the UN. Beginning with its Third Assessment Report in 2001, the lead technique for the IPCC to generate fear has been the iconic “hockey stick” graph, supposedly showing that world temperatures have suddenly shot up dramatically in the last 100 or so years, purportedly due to human influences.

  • The 2001 Third Assessment Report thus prominently featured the famous Hockey Stick graph, derived from the work of Michael Mann and other authors. Here is that graph from the 2001 Report:

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The Idiot's Answer To Global Warming: Hydrogen

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  • Hydrogen! It’s the obvious and perfect answer to global warming caused by human CO2 emissions. Instead of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels) we can leave out the carbon part, burn just the hydrogen, and emit nothing but pure water vapor. H2 + O = H2O! Thus, no more CO2 emissions . Why didn’t anyone think of this before now?

  • Actually, the geniuses are way ahead of you on this one. President George W. Bush was touting the coming “hydrogen economy” as far back as 2003. (“In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush launched his Hydrogen Fuel Initiative. The goal of this initiative is to work in partnership with the private sector to accelerate the research and development required for a hydrogen economy.”). Barack Obama was not one to get left behind on an issue like this. In the run-up to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015 Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced, “[F]uel cell technologies [i.e., hydrogen-fueled motors] are paving the way to competitiveness in the global clean energy market and to new jobs and business creation across the country.”

  • Then there’s the biggest hydrogen enthusiast of all, PM Boris Johnson of the UK, who promises that his country is at the dawn of the “hydrogen economy.” (“Towards the end of 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson released details of a 10-point plan for a so-called ‘green industrial revolution.’. . . This year will also see the government publish a Hydrogen Strategy that will “outline plans” to develop a hydrogen economy in the U.K.”)

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Trying To See If California's Energy Plans Add Up

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Trying To See If California's Energy Plans Add Up

  • A couple of weeks ago (July 29) I had a post titled “A Little Arithmetic: The Cost Of A Solar-Powered Grid Without Fossil Fuel Back-up.” In that post I did some simple calculations based on California’s current electricity usage and output from its existing solar generating facilities to figure out how much they would need in the way of solar panels and batteries to get through a low-output stretch in the winter without any fossil fuel assistance.

  • Since for solar energy the “low-output stretch” is essentially everything from September 21 to March 21, I calculated that they would need roughly something in the range of 54,000 GWH of grid-scale battery storage, which at current prices would run around $10 trillion — assuming that someone could in the meantime invent the grid-scale batteries for this purpose that could store thousands of GWHs of energy for as much as a full year until needed.

  • Now a reader from California writes to say that he has shown my July 29 post to some business associates who are in the process of developing one of the huge battery complexes that California is just starting to build.

  • The reader reports the response of his battery-developing colleagues as being, in summary, “his arithmetic is correct”; however, “his assessment doesn’t address all the tools in the toolbox.”

  • For supposedly a more full understanding, the battery-developers provide me with a link to the March 15, 2021 Report of several California agencies charged with meeting California’s 2045 zero carbon target, the Report being titled “Achieving 100 Percent Clean Electricity in California: An Initial Assessment.”

  • Does the California multi-agency Report provide any reason to believe that the California bureaucrats have any good idea as to how to get to a zero-emissions electrical grid? The answer is no.

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A Couple Of Examples Of Real Systemic Racism in the U.S.

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  • There has been a lot of talk recently about “systemic racism” in the United States.

  • At first, I was skeptical of the term, particularly because those who throw the term around rarely name an example of specific conduct by anyone that intentionally disadvantages blacks. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that there actually are quite a number of instances of major societal institutions engaging in systemic conduct that is clearly known to differentially disadvantage blacks.

  • In every case I can think of, the conduct that systemically disadvantages blacks is a sacred cow of the left promoted for the benefit of some other progressive interest group.

  • For today, I’ll discuss two of the most clear-cut examples.

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Andrew Cuomo And The Perils Of Politicized Prosecution

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Andrew Cuomo And The Perils Of Politicized Prosecution

  • Here in New York, the news today is dominated by one big story: a supposedly “independent” investigative report issued by the Attorney General has apparently validated allegations of a pattern of sexual harassment committed by our Governor, Andrew Cuomo. From CBS News, August 3:

  • New York Governor Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed multiple current and former staffers as well as women who did not work for his administration, the state's attorney general Letitia James said Tuesday during a press conference summarizing the findings of an independent investigation.

  • Suddenly, a guy who had been riding high on a wave of (ridiculously) favorable publicity for his (disastrous) handling of the Covid-19 crisis now faces calls from all over the place — even from President Biden! — to resign. How could this all have gone so wrong so quickly?

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