Daily Archives: 13 September 2022

Arizona Has a Chance to Lead the Way

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This fall, the good citizens of Arizona will be voting on, among other things, a State constitutional amendment that would make it more difficult to increase State taxes.

If passed it would amend the state constitution to require a 60% majority to raise taxes through any future referendum. Current law requires a two-thirds majority to raise taxes through legislation but only a simple majority to do so by plebiscite.

State Representative Tim Dunn (R), who led the effort to get this onto November’s ballot:

When you have something that you can’t change without going back to the voters, I think we should have overwhelming support.

Yewbetcha.

As The Wall Street Journal put it,

A 60% threshold ensures broad consensus before rates can be raised by referendum.
…
The point is to make it harder for Arizona to join states that raise taxes as a first fiscal resort rather than examine spending.

The Climate King

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King Charles III, who ascended the British throne in the aftermath of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II’s, unfortunate death, is a zealous climate activist.

He said less than a year ago in a speech in front of the UN COP26,

The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global systems level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel based economy to one that is genuinely renewable and sustainable[.]

Global systems level.

I have a couple questions.

When was the last time Prince Charles traveled to India or to the People’s Republic of China to…encourage…them to join this global system of his?

What was Prince Charles’ plan for helping the Third World to transition to this genuinely renewable and sustainable energy-based economy? Besides throwing other nation’s money at them, I mean.

What’s the schedule for King Charles’ trips to India and to the People’s Republic of China to encourage them to join this global system of his?

What is King Charles’ plan for helping the Third World to transition to this genuinely renewable and sustainable energy-based economy? Besides throwing other nation’s money at them, I mean.

And: is the scale and scope of the threat we face sufficiently dire that he will break with British royal tradition of being studiously apolitical and continue to espouse his climate activism?

This against the backdrop of the day-to-day, seasonal, and weather-driven extreme variability of the availability of solar- and wind-based energy, especially compared with the steady-state availability of fossil-fuel-based energy as new oil and natural gas wells come on line to replace depleting wells (which take years to deplete) and as new coal mines come on line to replace playing out mines (which take years to play out).

Never mind the larger backdrop of why we should care about atmospheric CO2, given the several epochs in our planetary history when temperatures were much higher than today, and life was lush, and the several epochs in our planetary history when atmospheric CO2 was much higher than today, and life was lush, and the fact that those two sets of epochs do not at all correlate with each other.

Never mind, either, that today, 11,000+ years after the last Ice Age, we’re still cooler than the geologic trend line of planetary warming, a trend driven by the fact that the sun is warming, and has been since it first fired up.