Solar Socket

The bull*** factor on this thing is phenomenal.  Never mind how it's supposed to work through a window or how it works if you're not facing dead south, just how much electricity are you supposed to suck up with a five-inch photovoltaic panel and a tiny battery to justify a plug that size?

I suppose that maths is something that happens to other people.

Earth Hour 2013

It's Earth Hour tonight, when all worshipers of Blessed Gaia are urged to switch off Thomas Edison's Instrument of Satan and sit smugly in the dark for 60 self-righteous minutes while the utilities fume over the damages caused by the spiking domestic demands.  To mark the occasion  we present our nomination for the theme song for the event.

So, turning off the lights involves turning on a lot more lights so people can boogie? Something's wrong here.

Sorry, lads, but if you're really serious about this, you shouldn't be switching off lights, you should be promoting fracking and a massive expansion of nuclear power. But that's a bit too much like progress for some tastes.

Definition of insanity

Animal rights ecofacists activists keep sending in drones to video pigeon hunts and the pigeon hunters keep shooting them down.  You'd think they'd learn that using flying cameras against people with guns has predictable results.

As for the hunters, use a shotgun instead of a rifle next time, man.

Water cyborg

Shenu: Hydrolemic System from takram on Vimeo.

I won't go into the technology here, as the flaws would fill a very large book. What really gets my odd toed ungulate is that people will look at this video's premise that Earth is on the verge of becoming a damp version of Arrakis and nod sagely.

And they think that people getting ready for the inevitable zombie apocalypse are silly.

Our future is a potato

Our "green" future

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the media is laying the groundwork for abandoning CAGW in favour of reviving that old chestnut of Malthusianism and resource scarcity.  Today's exhibit: An article in Slate about "food security" written by someone who clearly knows nothing about livestock and hopes you don't either.

The point of the article is, no surprise, to declare that the only answer is for us all to resign ourselves to becoming peasants–except for the enlightened oligarchs, of course, who must hold onto their high-tech lifestyles complete with air-freighted arugula.

For our good, of course.

Don't give up, change the subject

I think we can declare the global warming scare if not dead, at least on its way to the grave.  The BBC is already setting up the new threat to Blessed Gaia by rolling out that discredited Malthusian bogey man: Resource depletion.

And guess what the solution is?  Yes!  Exactly the same as for global warming.  What a coincidence.

What is a "green" job?

Next up: What is a Potemkin village?

The Great River Turbine

This seems to be a bumper week for Yanko Design (The DREADCO of the design world).  What else can one say when confronted with their "green" power triumph?  Behold: An undershot waterwheel of incredible inefficiency sitting out in a stretch of water with no way to turn it.

The elegance of its idiocy is breathtaking.

Welcome to the 13th century

The locomotive of the future

I've had this story on the peg for a couple of days and now that I've read it, I'm amazed at its awesomeness in terms of sheer stupidity.  Apparently, some nitwits have come up with the idea that the wave of the future is to pull trains with steam locomotives running on "green" "biocoal".

What is biocoal?  Let MSNBC enlighten us:

The biocoal is based on a so-called torrefaction process pioneered at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. To make it, woody material — in this case trees — are heated in the absence of oxygen. The resulting flaky matter is then rammed together under high pressure to create coal-like bricks.

In other words, it's charcoal.

I was gobstruck by this.  First off, as an archaeologist, I've seen the effects of a charcoal economy and it isn't pretty.  Trying to power even a pre-industrial society on the stuff will strip the woodlands bare in a few decades, but on a modern scale?  It isn't possible.  

And that isn't the stupid part.  This is: The locomotive these nimrods are going to use to test their fuel on is an oil burner, so they have to rip up a vintage piece of technology and convert it to burn solid fuel.

Excuse me, but if you're so keen on testing charcoal as a fuel, then why not ship a few tons to Yorkshire where there are any number of coal-burning steam trains still running on heritage lines that you could use–or you could if the drivers didn't give you an earful of why it's a daft idea.

Watermelons

Just finished Watermelons, James Delingpole's excellent book on the "green" movement and how it has free-fallen from people concerned about clean air to an anti-Western, anti-industrial, anti-Capitalist, anti-human Socialist movement that has grabbed on to the fallacy of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and turned it into a all-purpose bludgeon to force people to abandon civilisation and liberty in return  for... nothing, really.

Delingpole makes a multi-pronged attack on the movement including its origins, the duplicity of those behind it, the cod science that supports it and the ludicrous nature of  the precautionary principle.  He shows how it is possible to understand the scientific arguments and their flaws and that "don't worry your pretty little unqualified heads" is not an argument.  He also reveals what is at stake in this battle, for battle it is, and that if the worshipers of Blessed Gaia have their way, we will all suffer.  Most importantly, he explains how global warming is just one position that the Left will happily surrender when the time comes to fall back to a new bogey man.

Written in his usual irreverent style, Watermelons is must reading for anyone who needs to swot up on the arguments in a weekend.

Not as cuddly as it seems

The World Wildlife Fund:  Dedicated to protecting Blessed Gaia by relentlessly hounding mankind back to the Dark Ages.

Green evil

Take a good look at this man.  He is the face of modern environmentalism; a would-be Himmler who would slaughter 13/14ths of the world's population and subject the miserable rump to an eternal, Orwellian dictatorship to Save the Planet^TM.

Don't believe me?  Here are his views on mankind:

What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.

And democracy?

Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.

They say that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  This man's very intentions are evil.

Free-range jerks

From MSNBC:

(N)ew research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

Or the more likely explanation is that people who buy "organic" produce are a load of ignorant urban poseurs with more money than sense who live to posture ad nauseum about their "healthy" "green" diet when, in fact, they wouldn't know "organic" if they fell into manure pond.

In short, the sort of people who you find at a Seattle organic produce markets didn't become jerks, they are jerks.

Save the...CRUNCH!

They don't like vultures either

Are your bird-chopping windmills batting bald eagles out of the sky in sacrifice to Blessed Gaia?  Worried about slaughtering what was once the poster bird of the American environmentalist movement now being killed by that very movement?  No problem; just change the rule and make death by windmill legal

Needless shortages

From Powerline:

America has more fossil fuel resources than any other nation. Russia is second, Saudi Arabia is third. On Thursday, a representative of the Government Accountability Office testified before the House Science Subcommittee on Energy and Environment that the Green River Formation alone–it is located at the intersection of the states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, and mostly underlies federal lands–contains as much oil as the entire proven reserves of the rest of the world combined.

Not to mention all that shale gas in Britain and Poland plus the oil strike in the Falklands.  It looks as if trying to portray the current energy crisis as anything other than an artificial shortage engineered by Leftists for their own ends will be a much harder sell from now on.

A lesson that Germany is learning the hard way.

US government goes sane

Not designed to run on rainbows and unicorns.

Noticing that buying pointless biofuels at four times the costs of petroleum-based fuels is idiotic, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee order the Pentagon to stop using the "green" fuel until it becomes as cheap as petroleum.

Alternative energy

Give windmills' track record, this looks like a winner.

The logic of hysteria

Lord Summerisle vs Aristotle

Lord Christopher Monckton looks at the worshipers of Blessed Gaia and shows how they've sacrificed reason at the "green" alter.

Who needs logic when you have a wicker man?

Earth Day

It's Earth Day on Sunday and the worshipers of Blessed Gaia have been doing such a marvelous job of lampooning themselves while wrecking the world economy with their wind farms, refusal to drill for oil and gas, abandoning nuclear power for no good reason, regulating industry out of existence and generally carrying on as if civilisation is just the default position that will prevail no matter how much you damage it, that I've decided to give the satirical posts about patchouli oil and drum circles a rest this year.  Instead, I'd like to celebrate the man who did more to improve the environment by bringing power and wealth to the world than all the would-be Lord Summerisles  and Al Gores ever had or could: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

You want clean air, water, green fields and lush forests for the kiddies to romp in?  Then build an industrial society with lots of technology and cheap energy cranking out loads of wealth for all.  Then you'll have the surplus you need to garden the Earth properly.

Locavore lunacy

A few years ago, when the daughter was still in the infant stage, we took a cross-country motor trip from Seattle to Minneapolis.  During this, I discovered two things: First, working a petrol pump in South Dakota in the middle of winter in a howling wind while wearing a leather coat intended for Puget Sound is a good way to freeze to death and second, local food.  I don't mean regional recipes or cafes that serve bizarre burgers.  I mean the way in which the food spectrum changes.

I was fascinated with how the fish I encountered became smaller, more expensive and generally nastier until I visited a up-market supermarket in Burnsville, MN that was trying to sell salmon fillets at a premium price that a Seattle fishmonger would have chucked in the bin.  Meanwhile, the steaks became bigger, more tender and cheaper until for the price of a modest burger in Washington State I could, in Wyoming, buy a restaurant steak that completely obscured the plate and I could cut it with a fork.

This, to me, is what a locavore movement should be about; extolling to the masses the virtues of their local livestock and produce, imploring restaurants to take advantage of the local fish, reminding them that the sweet corn is delicious beyond the power of description and pointing out that the cheese at the farmers' market is a bit of all right.

Mind you, I have been to a few places in the world where the local stuff was so bad that I'd recommend importing every last crumb, but as a general principle, it's sound.

And I'm not alone.  Turn on any one of Gordon Ramsey's 3,472 television programmes and you'll hear him telling &^% restaurateurs that they're @)^&ing stupid not to @^%$ing use (&%@ing local food in their $%#@ing restaurants, the !&(%s.

Unfortunately, this being the age of irresponsible environmentalism and self-serving Gaia worship, locavorism has been co-opted into a hair-shirt movement devoid of any science, maths, economics or common sense as they turn a simple truth like buying the local rabbit is nicer into a crusade to Save the Planet^TM.  The image that keeps springing to mind is some benighted locavore fanatic who's fallen completely for the party line and vows to only eat what is grown within twenty miles.  Unfortunately, he lives in a prairie and the only thing grown within the sacred limits is grass.  Unless your name is Nebuchadnezzar, good luck with that.

The advocates bleat on about calories expended, food miles, sustainability and all manner of other things that they clearly don't understand, but which they seem to imagine make an iron-clad case for saying that if you eat New Zealand lamb, we'll all be dead by 2050.

It's at this point that logic and apocalypse fatigue starts to set in.  If things have really got so bad that my enjoying Chilean asparagus is the knife edge on which the fate of the world balances, then its far too late and would you please pass the hollandaise sauce?

Which reminds me, I must work on the Earth Day menu.  Let's see what's the best food I can find that will really clock up the odometer?