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Samizdata quote of the day – Jason Hickel is a knobhead Just to make this plain. Electricity is sold at the one price. We do not get charged different amounts for a green electron than a dirty brown one (we might well do dependent upon time of day, reliability of supply, etc, but that doesn’t change this particular argument). We have one price for the output. Whoever produces cheaper will make more profit. Because that’s just how profit works – revenue minus costs is profit. Therefore either renewables are cheaper and thus they make more profit or renewables are not cheaper and they make less profit.
There is no version of this story in which renewables are cheaper and yet they make less profit.
– Tim Worstall
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One of the central doctrines, perhaps the central economic doctrine, of the left is to deny the law of supply-and-demand. This is part of a general denial of economic law – indeed denial of objective and universal laws of reality.
This goes back (at least) to Robespierre – who opposed the death penalty for murder (indeed he had resigned from a pro Revolution court because he opposed the death penalty for murder), but supported the death penalty for violating his price controls (or even for verbally disagreeing with the Revolution).
This is because, to the left, prices are about “Social Justice” NOT supply and demand – so if it is “Social Justice” that “Green” energy is less expensive – then, to the left, it is less expensive, regardless of objective reality – because, to the left, “Social Justice” is more important than objective reality.
By the way on the latest media darling “Andy” Burnham……
The media (and Wikipedia and so on) are saying that Mr Burnham follows, bases his politics upon, “Catholic Social Teaching” – he-does-NOT.
Mr Burnham is not out campaigning against abortion, or homosexual acts, or anything else in relation to “Catholic SOCIAL Teaching” – what he may (perhaps) follow is Catholic ECONOMIC teaching – or, rather, a particular faction of Catholics on economics.
Catholics have always been divided on what a “Just Price” is – some Catholic thinkers (for example the scholastic School of Salamanca) argued that a “Just Price” (including wages – as wages are prices, as are rents) is one that is voluntarily agreed to by buyer and seller – but other Catholic thinkers have defined a “Just Price” very differently – as a price imposed by the authorities (with the threat of violence on people ignore this imposed price, wage, rent – whatever).
Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical seemed (seemed – there is some debate on this) to endorse the interventionist position on economic matters. Indeed the very first paragraph of the 1891 encyclical seems to make the claim that capitalism had led to a rise in poverty and immorality – both of these claims being false, indeed absurd. Compare countries in 1891 to 1791, or to 1491 for that matter – the idea that people were poorer or more immoral in 1891 is utterly false, indeed the opposite of the truth.
Be that as it may, a faction has grown up (of which the present Pope Leo XIV appears, perhaps, to be a member) which holds that government intervention on prices – including wages, rents and so on, is beneficial to the poor.
It must be clearly stated that such government intervention is not beneficial to the poor – indeed it greatly harms the poor.
To state these basic economic facts is in no way “anti Catholic bigotry” as many Catholic thinkers themselves, over the centuries, have understood these basic economic facts – it is just unfortunate (to put the matter mildly) that these are not the Catholic thinkers who are presently fashionable in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Some people may point out that Jason Hickel is a Professor.
Sadly being an academic, indeed being a senior academic who has won all sorts of prizes and other such, does not mean that someone accepts even the most basic laws of economics.
In Germany the “Historical School” (the “Socialists of the Chair” – although they were formally interventionists rather than full-on socialists) rejected the principles of economic law in the late 19th century.
This spread to the English speaking world with such people as Richard Ely (an influence on both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson) – the founder of the American Economics Association, who, indeed, not only rejected the basic principles of economics – but worked to try and ensure that people who understood economics did NOT get positions in academia.
The late W.H. Hutt was once asked how the Keynesians “won the debate” in economics departments – he replied, truthfully, that there was no real debate – the Keynesians just gained control of the setting and marking of examinations, and the appointment and promotion of academic staff – and “that was that”.
The economic doctrines of the late J.M. Keynes are nonsense – they violate basic logic, as does interventionism in general. But this basic truth does-not-matter in academia – what controls academia (and much else) is who is better at manipulating committees and so – and I am sure that Professor Hickel is excellent at such work.
The economic doctrines of the late J.M. Keynes are nonsense
All economic doctrines are nonsense.
“Economic doctrines” allegedly guide the policies of Governments. That’s what “political economy” is for.
But, the correct policies of governments are: doing nothing. Nothing as far as the economy is concerned. Especially – not to print money. Which is exactly what all economist recommend yes to do. The only difference between economic theorists is how much money printing is desirable.
Whatever they do – they (economists in government) – do harm.
Does private enterprise employ economists? Well, maybe the banks.
Most economists work in Government (or central banking, which is the same).
Renewables….
There ain’t such a thing as “renewables”. There is just windmills (hundreds of thousands) and solar panels (billions of them). They produce next to nothing. Electricity is supplied mostly by fossil-fuel plants (about 85%), with a little added by hydro dams and nuclear power.
Renewables are a fiction…
That’s not ideology or opinion, these are the facts.
They are not a fiction in the sense that billions of solar panels do exist, the fiction is that they produce anything (such as electricity).
No Jacob – the basic principles of economics are not nonsense.
All “Greens” are evil and ought to be treated that way. And I mean truly, deeply, evil.
No Jacob – the basic principles of economics are not nonsense.
Every economist has his own “basic principles” of economy. The one thing almost all agree on is: “print more money”.
All “Greens” are evil and ought to be treated that way. And I mean truly, deeply, evil.
No. Just idiots.
Come now, Jacob…. renewables produce oodles and oodles of what they are designed to produce: subsidies.
…said no Austrian school economist ever 😀
Mike Marsh,
LOL! It reminds me of a quote that nuclear fusion has produced many more PhDs than Watts.
Jacob,
They fly in private jets to conferences in nice places to try and ban plebs like me from getting on EasyJet.
They may be idiots. They are definitely, though, terrible cunts. And I say that with no offence to Uncle Monty who at least kept a decent cellar…
@Jacob
No. Just idiots.
Economists and Green doomsayers spend their lives making predictions that are almost always wrong. And yet they still get paid. I think these guys are f–king geniuses.
@Paul Marks
No Jacob – the basic principles of economics are not nonsense.
You have to distinguish. The principles of microeconomics are a law, not as in legislation passed by parliament, but law as in the laws of physics. There is no department of supply and demand to plan out that principle. No Federal Supply and Demand Enforcement police force to punish violators of the law. It happens as sure as gravity sucks you down, and petards hoist you up.
Macroeconomics is mostly bullshit. It has a track record of almost always being wrong about almost everything.
Anyone who insists they know the principles of economics well enough that they can use them to predict an economy, to the sort of accuracy and precision of (for example) a mathematician calculating the amalgamation of differentials in an integral, spouts nonsense.
“All economic doctrines are nonsense”
1) Incentives matter.
2) Opportunity costs. And there are always opportunity costs.
Those deal with most of it and if you can get your head around comparative advantage properly (the correct formulation is “We each do what we’re least bad at then swap the results”) then you’re good to go for 95% of the subject.
Cayley,
You may have heard of things like the N-body problem? There are things in maths or physics which are easy, there are things that are hard, things that are in principle indeterminable and there are things that are in principle impossible. Economics is different for sure (and not exactly a science*) but there are definitely principles that are defineable and lead either to the mansion or the workhouse. That is why I read Tim Worstall.
OK, the Hell with it! I give you IEEE754-2008. Did you know that 0/0 is not equal to 0/0? You do now! I only found that out this week and it is fascinating because it is where a computing standard meets pure maths and that is full circle. That goes back to Turing’s original theoretical work.
If economics is voodoo then guys like me are the Istari!
*Neither is history but we all know who won the Battle of Waterloo, right?
@Jacob
Indeed
There is no version of this story where “renewables” are reliable (or even vaguely real world useful on any scale).
Believe whatever economic arguments you wish. I never cease to be amazed listening to “economic” arguments for something which is so spectacularly and demonstrably useless.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing plenty of “economic” arguments when all this useless junk has to be disposed of. I doubt if I’ll be laughing though!
Tim Worstall’s two basic economic principles very nearly match my own three (which, TBH, I’ve learned from long years of reading him):
1: Every decision is a trade-off. That means there is no solution where everyone gains. Someone will always pay the price.
2. Jobs are a cost, not a benefit.
3. People will maximise their utility. That is, governments can pass whatever regulations they like, but their citizens will arrange their affairs such that the regulations will have the minimal effect.
PST,
On your third point. No. Some people may. Many others will use the regulations for their own benefit. “Renewable” energy is a massive case in point.Bear in mind that over half the economy is controlled by the state.
@Philip Scott Thomas
2. Jobs are a cost, not a benefit.
This isn’t quite right. Jobs are a cost to employers, but a benefit to employees.
If you build houses and I make nails, when you buy my nails they are a cost to you but a “benefit” to me. When you sell the house it is a cost to the homeowner and a “benefit” to you.
Employment is no different, it is just someone selling services for a price.
I had thought that knowing the difference between maths and physics was one of the “easy” things, but I keep running into people who screw it up.
Assuming your source on IEEE754-2008 is correct, if I had to guess a true sentence similar to what you said, it would be: “The IEEE754-2008 standard says that the floating point operation for comparison will return false if one or more of the operands is Not a Number.”
Specifically, the computing standard “meets” pure math by trying to set standards for abstractions (bits, bytes, ones & zeros) of physical phenomena (the existence/absence of an electric current in a specific path etched into a computer chip, among other possibilities) to approximate the behavior of the unique complete Archimedean ordered field. The standard is also concerned with cases where limitations of those physical phenomena (only finitely many paths etched out in those microchips) result in limitations of the abstract phenomena (finite precision for floating-point arithmetic) that are not shared by the real numbers.
People using those standards need to know about these possible cases where their computer is doing exactly what it is intended to do, yet still give results differing from what they’d expect if they thought their computer was working with reals. They also need to know about physical phenomena (i.e. overheating) that can cause that computer not to work according to intentions.
My point is, the “economic principles that are definable” are either too coarse for amalgamations to work without getting errors analogous to floating-point precision loss, or else require measurement so fine that no real-world events can be plausibly confirmed to match them.
I’d wager that the “economic principles that are definable” you posit are mostly approximations I’d agree are reasonable. You’re probably only mistaking them for absolutes due to the vast population of fools & knaves who insist that they can change reality by changing the approximations they use.
I was always under the impression that in mathematics, 0/0 is undefined.
No, the whole point of trade is that it’s beneficial to both parties, otherwise there wouldn’t be a trade.
PST : 1: Every decision is a trade-off. That means there is no solution where everyone gains. Someone will always pay the price
Didn’t follow that one. Isn’t the idea that people trade when they think they are going to gain by it ? They may sometimes be mistaken in their expectations, but I don’t think it’s every time.
I should have thought that the real point is that you seldom get a benefit without paying a cost. In a trade. Obviously if you’re a grifter you may be able to achieve that. But even grifting usually requires at least some effort.
Likewise confused.
I have too much bread, it will spoil before I eat it. You have too much ammunition to carry. A trade is arranged. Everyone gains!
@snag
No, the whole point of trade is that it’s beneficial to both parties, otherwise there wouldn’t be a trade.
Just because something is a cost doesn’t mean it isn’t beneficial. Your groceries are a cost, but the cost of a trade you consider beneficial.
Wages are a cost to an employer, but the value they produce is greater than the cost. Wages are a benefit to the employee, and they value the wages more than the opportunity lost to do other things with their time and skill.
“Wages are a cost.” Is subjective rather than objective, and thus fails to rise to the level of a truism. An economy with no jobs is a third world shithole, an economy with plentiful jobs is an economic powerhouse.
But what if machines did the work? You would just be recreating communism. Those at the top who control the machines (the means of production) would be very comfortable, thank you, while everyone else would be stuck on UBI. As improving one’s lot is basic human behavior you would then have a healthy black market run by unpleasant people dealing in things which should, in many cases, be controlled if not banned.
So, to maximize human happiness you need an economy with plenty of jobs and the opportunity to work hard and get a better one. Simples, as the kids say.
To understand trade, return to the basics. One man raises chickens, another grows rice. By exchanging some rice for some chickens, both get to enjoy a chicken and rice dinner.
That’s not quite true; hydro and geothermal can be, if you have the right geography or geology respectively. And the former is vulnerable to particularly dry years, as Norway is currently experiencing.
“Jobs are a cost to employers, but a benefit to employees.”
No, the job is a cost to the employee. He’s got to go and do the work. The wages are the compensation for that cost.
@TomJ
Hydro has always been useful hence it’s always been used.
I do stand corrected and perhaps I should have stressed the essentially “political” nature of “renewables” as propagandized (is that a word?) My belief that the end game with these damned things – that they are being used to destabilise and not to secure – is pretty unshakable.
There is SO much scope for greed and grift, greatly assisted alas by “economic” incentives
If I understand the pricing correctly, the most expensive fuel for electricity in the UK is gas.
For some reason (AIUI) the suppliers are allowed to count the entire bill as if it’s from the most expensive fuel. So if a supplier uses cheap fuel for 90% of the electricity, but expensive gas to top it up for 10% (or even 1%!) of the electricity, they can charge it as expensive gas.
The final electricity price on the market is set by the most expensive source that has to be “turned on” to meet demand. This is called the ‘marginal price’ since it’s the marginal source of electricity that sets the price.
So the price for ordinary people is high, and the supplier who can generate cheap electricity gets to pocket the difference.
Change that, so the price to the ordinary person reflects the cost of generation, and we’ll see if renewables can compete.
Cayley,
I do understand the difference between physics and maths. I was not trying to conflate them but pointing out that are insoluble physics problems that are insoluble for mathematical reasons.
As to IEEE754-2008 and all that. I have to disagree with you as to your point about abstractions of physical quantities. Information isn’t like that. It is truly independent of the physical mode of expression. The Qu’ran is in a sense exactly the same if it is written, printed, a pdf or indeed memorised by an imam.
Jacob and others.
I have already pointed out, many times, where you can if you can study the basic principles of economics – and they, for example, are not about “printing more money”.
If people find “Human Action” by Ludwig Von Mises difficult they can start with “Economics In One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt.
And NO economic principles are NOT just what an economist happens to think – they are principles of logic, NOT mathematical logic, but rather basic logical reasoning – there is no “my truth” or “your truth”, there is only THE TRUTH – which is NOT dependent on class, race, sex or historical period (see Carl Menger and his “War of Method” against the German “Historical School”).
If people wish to talk about economics, first study its basic principles.
If people will not do that – but still insist on talking about economics, such people are not behaving well.
…said no Austrian school economist ever …
Except Milton Freedman (for example) who said that you have to print just the “right” amount of money (i.e. a stable one).
Jabob – Milton Friedman was not a Austrian School economist, he was an arch opponent of the Austrian School, indeed of the very idea that economics is deductive discipline based on logical reasoning.
Turning away for what economics actually is – and towards “practical matters of policy”…..
The two “extremes” presented to the American public in the 1960s and 1970s were Francis Fox Piven (of “Cloward and Piven” fame, or rather infamy) and Milton Friedman.
Francis Fox Piven held that there should be a guaranteed income for people – even if they did no work at all.
And Milton Friedman held….. that there should be a guaranteed income for people – even if they did no work at all. It is right there in “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962) and “Free to Choose” (1980).
So if you choose one “extreme” you got a taxpayer provided income for people – who did no work, and if you choose the other “extreme” you got a taxpayer provided income for people – who did no work.
As I get older (I am older than sin – and twice as ugly) I start to suspect that the “two extremes” were on certain vital matters, not much different.
Certainly “Welfare Reform”, which started in Wisconsin, was about getting-away-from this idea that able bodied people should get money from the government WITHOUT working for this money. And this Welfare Reform is very much AGAINST what Milton Friedman had been pushing since at least 1962 – just as Right to Work laws (forbidding people being FORCED to join unions) were AGAINST the position of Milton Friedman (yes – he was against Right to Work laws).
And the idea (the idea of money from the government WITHOUT working for it) can be traced back to Thomas Paine – income for people in return for no work, education, healthcare, and so on.
Mr Paine first claimed that it could all be paid for by getting rid of the King and hangers-on. When it was pointed out that he sums did not add up, Mr Paine, in “Agrarian Justice” claimed it could be paid for by a tax on landowners going up to 100% for big landowners.
Even if one accepts that this could pay for year one of his schemes, what about year two? You have de facto confiscated (plundered) the wealth of the rich, to give the population money and services without work, but what do you do the next year? Obviously if you can get money without working, many (most?) people will not be working – as most jobs are horrible (to use fancy language – there is a large disutility from working, in a lot of jobs, which people accept in order to pay the bills – people knew that if they did not work they would go hungry), so how do you pay for all these people, and their children, in year two?
Anyway – when the American left say “we were not founded by Karl Marx, we were founded by Tom Paine himself” they, for once, are saying something that is not a total lie.
By the way – Jacob is CORRECT, the idea that the money supply should be increased to “keep the price level stable” is wrong – in fact is it horribly wrong, it is the Credit Bubble policy of Benjamin Strong (New York Federal Reserve) and Irving Fisher (Yale) in the late 1920s.
It is, to be blunt, a bat-shit-crazy policy – and yet this is what Milton Friedman advocated. To the late Professor Friedman the problem was not the Credit Money bubble of the late 1920s – to him the problem was that this Credit Money “boom” did not (somehow) just carry on for ever – without a “bust”.
In short, on this particular matter, the late Professor Friedman was down-on-all-fours with the late Lord Keynes and President Richard Nixon.
Is it though? My understanding is that the true cost of renewables is never honestly calculated. For example, wind and solar do not work at all for days and weeks during winter, therefore the cost of having sufficient gas-fired or imported power to cover this should be considered part of the cost of wind and solar. It is not.
NickM –
When I wrote “People will maximise their utility” there should have been a “For instance” after it. When economics talk about people maximising their utility there’s a lot packed into the idea. It assumes moral agency, that people have the ability to make choices. Second, “utility” here doesn’t mean “usefulness”. It means people will use their moral agency to make decisions to optimise their situation.
That’s where the “for instance” should have come in. For some people that’s nothing more than leaving one job for a better paying one.
Some will choose to ignore legislation that makes their life less than optimal as they see it. So if the State uses taxation to make smoking very expensive some will avoid that situation by turning to the black market.
Others will, as you pointed out in your response, take advantage of government policy by grifting.
That’s really the point I was trying to make – that people have moral agency and will make choices that improve their lot in life. That’s why incentives matter; people respond to them.
PST,
Good comment. And it’s not just “grifting”. It can be far worse than that. See Al Capone and Joe Kennedy and so many others. If the insane “War on Drugs” hadn’t happened Columbia wouldn’t have a hippo problem…
No, but IEEE754-2008 is about using abstractions to represent information. The ones & zeros are the abstractions; they can be represented by the alignment of magnetic fields on hard drives, some sort of etching on optical disks, the presence or absence of a current in RAM, etc. However you get your ones & zeros, IEEE754-2008 gives instructions for working with them that approximate the relations in an ordered field containing the limits of all Cauchy sequences & no infinitesimal elements.
One could use zeros & ones for other purposes; i.e. encoding integers, letters, etc. Likewise, one could use zeros & ones to encode information about real numbers following different schema; i.e. a pair of integers representing the numerator & denominator of a fraction. Finally, the real-life phenomenon one wishes to describe with IEEE754-2008 might turn out to be poorly represented by real numbers.
The point us, those zeros & ones aren’t the information; they are the abstract building blocks used to store/symbolize the information.
Likewise, one can use writing, printing, pdfs, or memory to hold information stored in languages other than that which is used to write the Qu’ran. You can use the language in which the Qu’ran is written to hold other information than the Qu’ran (I only speak English, so I can’t give an example for sure, but I’m willing to gamble I’m correct). The abstraction is finding the sense in which those obviously different things in your example are the same (encodings of yhe Qu’ran) while also being distinct from
cases where someone used writing, language, etc. to encode different information.
With economics it is like with philosophy or religion. Everyone has his own religion and everyone is absolutely sure that his religion is the true one.
Microeconomics is like arithmetic. 1 + 1 = 2; When item 1 gets more expensive you might be unable to buy it and will seek a cheaper alternative. 1 + 1 = 2; This is obviously true, but trivial. Beyond that economics is just words.
“People will maximise their utility”
This is just a mantra. A worthless observation. Because it is circular or tautological. John did A. He did it to maximize his utility. How do we know? Because he did it. Therefore it must have maximized his utility.
Yeah, the first part of my earlier comment was unfair, based on my knee-jerk reaction to skimming your comment. Please forgive me for accusing you.
Germany has installed 300,000,000 solar panels. (Three hundred million), Each one approx. 1X2 meters in size, weighing about 40 kg each. Of black irons and glass. And they produce next to nothing. All 300,000,000 million of them.
Talking about “maximize their utility”…..
People are stark crazy. That’s the only explanation to this behavior. And not just the odd crazy one out there. Whole governments, many governments, legislators, etc. The leaders. And not just in Germany. In many countries, including China and India (the most populous).
Ah… and they plan (and are in the process) to install another 300,000,000. In Germany.
No probs, Cayley, I sometimes type faster than I think!
they can start with “Economics In One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt.
Very alluring text.
But it is not considered a valid economics text by most, or all, current economists. And not something that is implemented anywhere.
Jacob – I have been careful from the start of this thread, and on many other threads on this site, to say I am concerned with the principles of economics. Not with who is employed in economics departments.
You know very well what most academics are like – and that it is correct to despise their intellectual dishonesty. Truly they are children of Richard Ely – and before all the way back to the “noble” liar himself – Plato.
You’re measuring with the wrong metrics.
They produce 300,000,000 units of Smug.
And they produce it rain or shine, night or day.
🙂
Funny, thought provoking, but wrong.
There is a fundamental difference between:
on the 1 hand, physical systems minimizing free energy, or physical objects such as electrons or water molecules “choosing” the path of least resistance;
on the other hand, agents “consciously” evaluating various options and choosing the option that maximizes utility.
And i am using “consciously” quite loosely here. What i mean is that an agent must have an internal representation of options, together with an associated figure of merit representing the option’s utility. Once you have that, the choice is easy.
That is why i tend to disagree with Fraser Orr about LLMs, and it is also why i radically disagree with Paul Marks about his concepts of “”free-will””, “predetermined”, and “choice”.
An addendum: the choice is easy, meaning that it requires a simple algorithm and little hardware.
But you do still need the algorithm and the hardware.
@Jacob
Germany has installed 300,000,000 solar panels … And they produce next to nothing… Talking about “maximize their utility”…..
You seem to be missing the word “their” in “maximizing their utility”. They are maximizing what they consider useful, not you. You think maximizing power is the most useful thing, apparently they consider green priorities more useful. I mean I don’t agree with them, but it is their money, so they can do whatever they want.
Why do some people buy a sports car rather than a simple car? I might think it is dumb and even dangerous, but they do what pleases them according to whatever values they have.
And Solar Power generates 15% of Germany’s electrical needs, soon to be 30%. I think calling that “next to nothing” is rather overstating your case.
Jacob
This is just a mantra. A worthless observation. Because it is circular or tautological.
I take it that you’re not an student of human activity.
There is a distinction between macro-economics, a butt-load of woo, and micro-economics, conclusions drawn from observed behaviour.
Milton was a Monetarist, not Austrian School at all.
And Solar Power generates 15% of Germany’s electrical needs, soon to be 30%. I think calling that “next to nothing” is rather overstating your case.
That is a green lie. A typical and characteristic green lie.
Because when the sun produces some electricity, they count every drop produce and credit it to the sun. But’ at the same time, fossil fuel power plants continue working, and continue burning fuel, because they are needed in the evening and can’t be turned off on on short notice. They burn fuel but their production is not counted.
Same with exports. When there overabundance of electricity during sunny days, they export some of it, but attribute the export to the fossil plants, and ALL the sun output is assigned to domestic consumption.
Yes, the sun panels produce something. Very little of it is useful.
So, beware of green lies. There are many.
So Austrian economics lives in books by Ludwig von Mises. Have you encountered it in real life?
Yes Jacob – reality is real.
Ludwig Von Mises did not discover that – the basic laws of reasoning have been known for thousands of years.
Like the founder of the Austrian School, Carl Menger, Ludwig Von Mises only applied the laws of reasoning to economics – he did not invent them.
Perry – see my comment of 1002 AM of the 17th of September.
Argentina right now actually, but also Hayek, Von Wieser, Menger
Jacob – one of things I find baffling is the closure of nuclear power stations in Germany.
There were no great safety problems, and if they were really concerned about Carbon Dioxide emissions they would build more nuclear power stations (perhaps the modular nuclear reactors that Japanese are building).
I am baffled, utterly confused, by the closure of nuclear power stations in Germany.
No need to be: Merkel decided on the closure after Fukushima* because she was doing badly in the polls.
Closures continued because the Greens got into government, and as we all know the Greens are in Putin’s pocket.
* George Monbiot was converted to nuclear power by Fukushima, but Monbiot does not need to win elections.
@Snorri Godhi
No need to be: Merkel decided on the closure after Fukushima* because she was doing badly in the polls.
Yup, Germany is well known for all the huge earthquakes it has, and that Baltic Sea is a menace with all the tsunamis it produces.
(I seem to be in a sarcastic mood this morning.)
Jacob – one of things I find baffling is the closure of nuclear power stations in Germany.
Yup, Germany is well known for all the huge earthquakes it has, and that Baltic Sea is a menace with all the tsunamis it produces.
Germany installed 300,000,000 (THRE HUNDRED MILLION) useless black iron and glass monsters, covering up its splendid pastoral land.
My conclusion: they are stark crazy. Terminally crazy. There is no other explanation. A is A.
(I won’t invoke arguments from recent German history…)
I mean, others, like America or China or even India are probably crazy too. But that does not make the Germans un-crazy.
Sure, they produced some sane people too, and many great ones, Gauss, Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Beethoven, etc. But, mostly, it’s the lunatics that rule Germany.
Jacob – as no one has come up with alternative explination, then the rulers of Germany may indeed be crazy.
And not just on energy policy – I can remember Chancellor Merkel, decades AFTER it had become obvious that the early 1970s decision to allow “Guest Workers” (a bad idea in its self) to bring over their families (meaning that guests would NOT go home – and more “guests” would be born) had been an utter-disaster, responding by allowing in millions of MORE (hostile – yes hostile, people whose principles were opposed to the West) immigrants – as if the situation was not bad enough already.
It is hard to see such decisions as other than a form of collective insanity in the governing elite – and not just in Germany (where anyone who questions policy gets “Nazi! screamed at them – and may even be put in prison), but in other Western nations as well.
For example, the collapse of once conservative Canada (which started with the destruction of the traditional flag, the Red Ensign, in 1965) has been astonishing – and horrible.
According to Prime Minister Trudeau, Canada is a country without a national culture – i.e. Canada is not a nation according to the Prime Minister of the nation, and Prime Minister Carney is the same – another puppet of the international elite, filled with hatred (actual hatred) for the ordinary people of the nation.
A housing crises? Women having to trade sex for a roof over their heads?
Response? Yet MORE Third World immigration.
Supposedly Canada, and the rest of the West, is not dying fast enough – “Faster Pussycat – Kill! Kill!”.
That “Faster Pussycat – Kill! Kill!” will probably be the title of the next major “White Paper” government policy document in Britain.
I am baffled, utterly confused, by the closure of nuclear power stations in Germany.
Check your premises. You supposed the Germans were more or less normal, rational, people. Well, you need to revise that assumption.
The trivial and normal and sane position is the Swiss one: 1. we will build no new reactors. 2. The 4 existing, operating ones will continue to operate as long as the Nuclear Power Commission certifies they are safe.
Jacob – the Swiss should build more nuclear reactors. Small, modular ones, which have no major safety concerns.
In the long term nuclear fusion may come into operation – but for now it is nuclear fission.
It is not only the leaders.
Both policies, ban nuclear, and pave over Germany with black irons and monstrous bird-shredders are widely popular and supported by majority of the people.
Small, modular ones, which have no major safety concerns.
I.e. those that do not yet exist, except in imagination.
When they materialize, we will debate their pros and cons.
The Swiss are not yet in need of revising their decissions.