Tag Archives: political economy

Continuing His Father’s Virtue-Signaling

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Prince William is royally frustrated with the pace of “climate” solutions and wants them developed and executed faster.

For now, we’re quite keen on the scale…when we scale up [solutions], how can we have the biggest change? For me, that’s something I haven’t quite cracked yet, is “how do we scale faster?”
I’m impatient with all this. You guys provide the product…the inspiration, the solution, my role is to get you as big, as fast, and as scalable as possible…. We’ve still got some work to do on that.

First, though, William needs to demonstrate that there is, actually, a crisis. The idea that storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, etc are getting steadily worse has long since been debunked.

Then there’s the fact that the plethora of climate models have consistently exaggerated the degree of predicted global warming over the last 25+ years they’ve been making their predictions—in fact, there’s been very little global warming. And those models still cannot even simultaneously predict the past and the present.

Then there’s the fact that the climate mavens’ go to source, the UN’s IPCC, has used the highly unlikely worst case scenario to push for zero atmospheric carbon emissions “right damn now,” while desperately ignoring the much more likely middle scenario which predicts…meh.

Then there’s the larger picture:

  • we’re 11.5k years after the end of the last severe glaciation (and still in middle of the latest Ice Age, which began some 2.8 million years ago), and we’re still cooler than the geologic warming trend line*, and much cooler than the warming excursion of 6k, or so, years ago
  • ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica that reach back 400k years indicate the atmospheric CO2 increases coincident with or after planetary warming, not before
  • there are epochs in which Earth was much warmer than today, and life was lush; there are epochs where atmospheric CO2 was much higher than today, and life was lush; those epochs do not correlate with each other—indeed, there are epochs of high temperature and low atmospheric CO2 and periods of high atmospheric CO2 and low temperature, along with high levels of each and low levels of each
  • there are epochs with no Artic ice sheet and a greatly reduced Antarctic ice sheet, and life was lush.

If the prince doesn’t demonstrate the existence of a climate crisis, instead of just blindly repeating what members of the climate funding industry tell him, he is just virtue-signaling and needn’t be taken seriously, no matter his august nobility.

 

*The trend line is very noisy, but Earth is warming, and has been since it began—because our sun has been warming ever since it gravitationally collapsed far enough to light off its fusion process.

Crippling under “Migrant” Crisis

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New York City Progressive-Democratic Party Mayor Eric Adams thinks the city is crippl[ing] under monumental budget cuts due to a migrant crisis straining public resources.

Adams is either entirely duplicitous in this, or he really is that oblivious to the facts staring him in the face, or he’s consciously turning his face away from what’s going on along our southern border (duplicitous along a different axis). In the first place, he’s not inundated with migrants, he’s getting a small flow of illegal aliens.

To the extent they are “straining public resources,” it’s because, first, the city never has taken public resource availability seriously—see the high level of homelessness before the small flow of illegals began. Second, that “strain” is because he’s chosen to divert those resources away from city residents in favor of supporting those illegals, who have no call on any American resources other than those any detention facility must provide for its inmates.

Aside from that, his city does not, in fact, have an illegal alien crisis. The cities and towns and villages along our southern border have an illegal alien flood crisis. They’re the ones who have to deal with high and increasing flow of illegals across our border.

To further illustrate the manufactured nature of his hysteria, this is what Adams wants to do otherwise with city—city residents’ tax—money.

He wants to remove from the city statues of heroes of our War of Independence and of our subsequent national founding; statues, for instance, of George Washington. He also wants to remove statues of figures involved in the Western World’s discovery of the New World; statues, for instance, of Christopher Columbus.

He wants to create a reparations task force.

He wants anti-racism training for human services contractors and city employees.

All that while pushing for budget cuts—because all those illegal aliens “migrants” of his are costing so much to welcome into his sanctuary city.

Cowardice in DoE

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Recall that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tried a cross-country trip in her electric vehicle convoy and that, along the way on a hot and humid Georgia day, a staffer driving a gasoline-powered vehicle blocked off an EV charging station so that when the rest of Granholm’s group arrived, one of the EVs in her convoy would have a place to recharge. Police were called over the behavior by a separate EV driver who needed a charge and had a small baby in the car.

Last Tuesday, Granholm was called to testify before the House Science and Technology Committee about that incident among other items. Responding to Congressman Scott Franklin’s (R, FL) question about the incident, Granholm said,

Let me just say, I have a fantastic young staff, just fantastic. It was poor judgment on the part of the team.

Fair enough, openly acknowledging the error like that.

But when pressed by Franklin,

Granholm also sidestepped blame during the back-and-forth with Franklin on Thursday, saying that it was not her that was “saving the spot.”

But whose error, again? Isn’t she the one in charge? Wasn’t her fantastic young staffer only acting within the department culture and associated imperatives that she has consciously developed during her tenure?

This is the arrogance of Government above all, and the MFWIC of DoE above all of that. Not her fault; she’s the one in charge, she’s not one of the worker bees who, you know, actually do things.

Oh, W-a-ah

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These precious ones bring it on themselves.

Big banks and brokerage firms are handing over bigger checks to settle regulatory investigations, including those that don’t result in losses for investors. US market regulators are increasingly demanding tens of millions of dollars to settle technical violations that just a few years ago cost companies much less to resolve.

Because:

The SEC settles most of its enforcement cases, and Wall Street firms prefer to pay fines and avoid litigation that would put more heat on executives. But SEC officials under Chair Gary Gensler are seeking higher fines to settle, even if prior offenders paid less.

We’re supposed to feel sympathy for these…personages. Wall Street Is Furious Over Rising Fines From SEC goes the headline. There’s much about which to criticize Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, but Wall Street executive shyness, fear of heat, outright cowardice isn’t on that list.

That those worthies would rather settle and skitter into the baseboard holes to avoid a bit of heat does severe disservice to the companies they’re pretending to manage and those companies’ shareholders. Litigation costs too much, and it’s cheaper to settle? Settling repeatedly runs up that cost and alters the balance.

If Wall Street managers were worthy of their paychecks, they’d hie the SEC into court over the SEC’s charges, which range from social and climate justice claptrap to the trivia noted in the linked article to the occasional legitimate SEC beef. It would take only a few wins in court to get the SEC to back off and stick to its knitting.

Knee-jerk settling SEC suits is a violation of those persons’ fiscal duties.

Speaker McCarthy and a Government Shutdown

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Supposedly, there’s considerable pressure on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) to Do Something to avoid a government shutdown in a couple of weeks.

Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t.

Part of the pressure is purely internally political. There’s no real downside to shutting down the government for a period of time, as the Schumer Shutdown and the Obama Shutdown before that demonstrated.

Besides, the government wouldn’t be fully shutdown—only non-essential areas like the EPA (whose then head demonstrated that 90% of her department employees were non-essential, at least in the short- to mid-term, when she furloughed them) would be seriously impacted.

Social Security and Medicare payments would go as scheduled, Federal debt payments would go as scheduled, our military would still be paid as scheduled, and on and on, all because there’s plenty of tax revenue coming in under current tax law to make those payments.

See this graph, from an earlier article of mine: