September 04, 2023

UK Now "Hopelessly Divided" Over The Net Zero Program

September 04, 2023/ Francis Menton

As recently as a year ago, the UK appeared to have unstoppable momentum on the march to “net zero” CO2 emissions.
By the Climate Change Act of 2008, adopted under Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the country legally committed itself to reduce carbon emissions by 80% (from the 1990 level) by 2050. In 2019, during a Conservative government headed by Prime Minister Theresa May, Parliament amended the Act (by unanimous vote!) to make the emissions reduction/net zero mandate 100%. The next Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, also a Tory, proved to be unequalled in his zealotry for the climate campaign. The net zero mandate had both energetic support at the top of government, and the backing of an all-party consensus in Parliament.
Today, Net Zero Watch issued a press release describing the UK government as “hopelessly divided” over climate issues. (Full disclosure: Net Zero Watch is an affiliate of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, where I am a board member of the sister affiliate American Friends of the GWPF.).
What has happened?

September 02, 2023

The Whole Idea Behind Homeless Advocacy Is To Not Solve The Problem

September 02, 2023/ Francis Menton

Perhaps it is a little early for another update here on the “homelessness” situation in San Francisco. (My last update was about six months ago in March 2023.).
But there is a good reason for an update now: At least a few people seem finally to be catching on that the basic idea behind “homelessness” advocacy is to exploit an issue that brings forth great human empathy to generate vast taxpayer funds and then to not solve the problem. The spending continues and increases without limit.
There is way too much money — for advocates — in “homelessness” for the problem ever to get solved, or even to decrease materially.

August 29, 2023

August 29, 2023/ Francis Menton

On the march to Net Zero carbon emissions from usage of energy, the key first step is to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity, replacing them with the magical “renewables.” Or so we are told. Once electricity generation is fossil fuel-free, then all energy use can be switched to electricity, without any of the evil emissions. Voilà — Net Zero!
But somehow, in the places that have tried to go this route with wind turbines and solar panels, the push to get more electricity generation from “renewables” has seemed to stall out at around 40 - 45%. (Some small countries with lots of hydropower get higher percentages by counting the hydropower as “renewable.”). Countries may build more and more solar panels and wind turbines, but somewhere in the 40s the percentage that those things contribute to electricity generation just doesn’t seem to budge very much any more.
And that’s why it’s so exciting that in the first half of 2023 Germany finally crashed through the 50% barrier, becoming the first significant country with little hydropower to achieve more than half of its electricity generation from “renewables.”

August 27, 2023

August 27, 2023/ Francis Menton

Free speech today is under assault from the Left everywhere and all the time.
You already know about the federal government’s pervasive Censorship Industrial Complex, pressuring all the big social media companies to suppress what they deem “misinformation” about any subject important to the current dominant political narrative (Covid-19, climate change, etc.).
And you already know about ex-President Trump getting indicted by both federal and Georgia prosecutors for saying the same things about the 2020 election that Al Gore said about the 2000 election and Hillary Clinton said about the 2016 election and Stacey Abrams said about the 2018 election.
But how about the Left using its widespread control of social institutions to silence dissent. Today, this is literally everywhere. Here are a couple of notable examples for today — both, as it happens, from outside the U.S.:

August 24, 2023

August 24, 2023/ Francis Menton

Beginning in April 2014 — one month after then Vice President Joe Biden became “point man” for U.S. policy in Ukraine — Joe’s son Hunter took a directorship of Ukrainian energy company Burisma at a fee of $83,333 per month, or $1 million per year. Burisma was then strongly suspected of corruption, and within only a few months it came under official investigation, following the appointment in early 2015 of Victor Shokin as Ukraine’s General Prosecutor.
Then in late 2015 and early 2016, VP Joe Biden engineered the firing of Shokin by threatening to withhold a billion dollars of U.S. aid, which aid he controlled at that time. Joe later admitted on a widely-viewed video that he threatened to withhold the U.S. aid as the means to get Shokin fired.
So was the million per year paid to Hunter a legitimate business transaction, or was it an obvious bribe to Joe to get him to leverage U.S. aid to Ukraine to protect Burisma from the prosecutor?

August 22, 2023

August 22, 2023/ Francis Menton

It’s hard to learn what’s going on in China, and it’s getting harder. Data series that show anything unfavorable are suppressed or discontinued, and journalists who might write something negative are increasingly unwelcome. But there is every reason to think that China’s forty-year economic boom at the minimum is stalling out, and indeed its economy may be headed for a major crash.
The Wall Street Journal has two significant pieces on this subject in the last two days: from yesterday, a long front-page news article with the headline “China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next?”; and today, a lead editorial “The Electric-Vehicle Bubble Starts to Deflate.” (Both are probably behind the pay wall.).
But before discussing those in more detail, let’s review the important background. China’s economy took off in the 1980s when then-leader Deng Xiaoping loosened state controls and allowed a private sector to grow and flourish. Current leader Xi Jinping, who assumed power in 2013, has reversed that policy and increasingly tightened state control and direction of the economy, particularly since his second term began in 2018.
Are there any lessons that we in the U.S. and the rest of the West should be learning here?