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Image by Cortex Zone from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Interest Rate Climate Porn attacks Australia
Henceforth and verily, a witless economic model stacked on top of a skillless scientific one says that eating beef steaks makes the interest rate rise. But, don’t worry, if you spend thousands buying heat pumps, windmills and EVs from Matt Kean’s friends, you’ll pay less on the mortgage (trust us) and Wollemi Capital, who Matt Kean works for, will make more money.
Right now, interest rates are a hot topic, so bingo, Climate Change causes that too:
Inaction to force up rates, says Climate Change Authority’s Matt Kean
By Rosie Lewis, The Australian
Natural disasters fuelled by a failure to curb global warming will make higher interest rates a permanent feature of Australia’s economy, the government’s climate change tsar Matt Kean has claimed, as analysis shows the extent to which climate inaction will harm the nation – in particular in NSW and Queensland – and reduce households’ income.
The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority has relied on economic modelling by Oxford Economics Australia to inform its first stress test of how a changing climate could affect home […]
By Jo Nova
What’s most interesting about this is that this paper was ever published at all, given how awful it was.
In April last year Nature released the Kotz study which said that climate change would cause a mind-blowingly shocking 62% reduction in economic output by 2,100AD. Now, we know it’s wrong because the climate models are useless, but it turned out that one outlier country singlehandedly trashed the world economic forecasts, and that was Uzbekistan. Instead of a 62% reduction, without Uzbekistan, the global drop was “only 23%”.
So much for “peer review” then? This paper’s conclusion was wildly worse than the consensus of doomer papers, but the peer reviewers didn’t figure out why its result was so skewed, so Nature, supposedly the most esteemed repository of science, published the outlier anyway.
Even the uber left The New York Times is saying they should have been more skeptical:
Top Journal Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll
By Lydia DePillis, The New York Times
Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world’s economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper’s detractors emphasize that climate change is a […]
By Jo Nova
Rich nations protect the Earth
Despite the UN blaming the rich nations for destroying the planet, the data shows that wealthy nations have cleaner air and water and less deforestation.
A team at Yale compile a score called the Environmental Performance Indicator. It tracks 58 factors like biodiversity, species protection, particulates in air, pollution in water, forest integrity and fish stocks. It also, sadly, considers “climate change mitigation” measures — which no doubt adds some pointless noise to the line. But the underlying trend is clear. The only countries in the highest ranks of Environmental Performance are the ones with a GDP per capita higher than $30,000 US.
Possibly the best thing we could do for the environment is help poor nations grow their own economy. And the stupidest thing we could do is push unreliable energy onto the third world and deprive them of coal plants “for the sake of the environment”.
https://epi.yale.edu/
Obviously, anyone can raze a forest, and throw rubbish in the river, but it costs money to protect trees and plants, clean up waste, and filter factory chimneys. People who are hungry understandably, don’t care much about setting up […]
By Jo Nova
Paul Homewood came across another die-hard believer still saying “What about all the subsidies!” He reminds us of the Guardian headline hand-wringing over $7 Trillion dollars of subsidies in support of fossil fuels. The main source of this meme is the IMF, so I went to their two year old report data to create the graphs that the IMF won’t.
The IMF fossil fuel fantasy update of 2023…
The trillion dollar claims of fossil fuel subsidies amount to nothing more than IMF wet dream. Literally, 80% of the “subsidies” are what they’d like to charge oil and gas companies for things like the imaginary damage that CO2 does on simulated Earths in broken climate models. The IMF calls this “implicit subsidies”. You can I might call it a brazen fake (or worse).
The IMF has a budget of over $1 billion dollars a year, and they have 20 impenetrable super-graphs on their blog and report, but they don’t have the simple graphs like this, that I did below, showing that most of the subsidies are the “implied” imaginary sort, and that one country on Earth does all “the subsidies”. (Click to Enlarge…) Nobody mention China.
The orange […]
By Jo Nova
If man-made climate change does anything at all, it makes Global Disasters tamer
Humans produced 980 billion tons of CO2 in the last 32 years, yet global losses due to weather related damage are shrinking as a proportion of our economy.
Despite there being more humans on Earth than ever before, with more buildings, farms, and factories just waiting to be wrecked by bad weather, somehow global weather disaster losses are not as large a part of our economy as they used to be.
All those extra houses, tractors and cars are sitting-ducks for storms, floods, and hailstones, yet the “climate crisis” is doing less damage to our GDP than it used to when CO2 levels were much lower.
Back in 1990 global CO2 levels were just 355ppm, now it’s more like 417ppm.
Roger Piekle Junior investigated the economic losses of weather disasters for the last three decades. He found that when losses were adjusted for inflation, and measured as a proportion of global GDP, damages were shrinking.
Naturally this tells us nothing at all about what drives the climate, but shows the prophesies are bonkers, and the relentless weather porn on the news is like […]
The rise of the tech giant billionaires, the crime, corruption, wokery, war, inflation, climate witchcraft, and the Big-Pharma reckless experiment — is all made possible by the same thing, and it’s been coming for fifty years.
Everyone under 40 has lived their entire lives in the fairy-land-of-plenty borrowed from the future. But all bubbles come to an end.
The rot started with a corrupted currency, and now infects every corner of the world — weakening markets and minds and concentrating power obscenely. When our medium of exchange is undisciplined, everything else is too. There is injustice built right in to Fake IOU’s made from thin air — especially when some can borrow big and early and at low cost, while others have to wait to earn them slowly an hour at a time. In the inflation race, speed is everything. They devalue the incentives that drive people to make things better, faster, and stronger. It punishes the prudent hardworking savers, and feeds speculative greed.
This is what BlackRock’s influence came from, and Gates, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the WEF. All of them rode the wave of easy money and easy loans. Through predatory purchases on credit, they were able to buy […]
Suddenly central bankers want to reach right into your wallet, follow you around, nudge your every decision, or just stop you spending your dollars less wisely than the average bureaucrat thinks you should. These are the same people who *know* you should be saving the Earth by eating crickets.
This is a great essay, part fiction, part nightmare, but already knocking on our doors. A Central Bank Digital Currency (or CBDC) is your digital ID card and social credit score wrapped into one and actioned with instant bank-freezing potential, honk, honk.
Imagine living off food-stamps.
Just Say No to CBDCs says N.S.Lyons
You wave your phone at the pump. Nothing happens. You try again. Your phone buzzes, and you look at it. There’s a message from the Fed: “You have already spent more than the $400 maximum weekly limit on fossil fuels specified in the FedWallet User Agreement. Your remaining account balance cannot be used to purchase non-renewable energy resources. Please make an alternative purchase. Have you considered a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle? Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and sustainable world!”
You have in fact considered purchasing […]
John Hussman warns that people may not realize how much stocks are likely to crash
Dr David Evans supplied some interesting links and adds “The biggest theme in markets is that ratios eventually revert to their mean (or average). No, it’s not different this time. A return to average on this graph implies a drop of about 75%.”
Hassman Margin-Adjusted P/E (US stock market price-earning ratio (adjusted))
John Hussman: Investors are paying top dollar for top dollar
Why is it so hard to accept that speculative bubbles can burst? Interest rates were driven to zero for a decade. Yield-starved investors chased stocks to valuations beyond the 1929 and 2000 extremes. That speculation front-loaded more than a decade of future market gains into the present. Those gains are now behind us, embedded in breathtaking multiples. If history is any guide, a collapse in valuations is likely to return those gains to the future.
The process of losing speculative gains and recovering them over time is what I’ve often called a “long, interesting trip to nowhere.” It bears repeating that the S&P 500 lagged Treasury bills from 1929-1947, 1966-1985, and 2000-2013. 50 years out of an 84-year period.
Now, […]
Australia Wins The Global Patsy Award 2019
The Brookings Institute released a report that claims everyone is better off economically by sticking to Paris, but check out the devastating graphs. Economically, everyone is a loser, but the three biggest losers are Australia, Russia and OPEC.
Australia is doing more, paying more, suffering more and yet will make almost no difference to the global emissions tally in anything other than a purely symbolic impress-your-dinner–guests kind of way.
If Australia left the Paris Agreement, even the left leaning Brookings Institute can’t find much difference in total global man-made emissions. Australia is forcing the renewables transformation faster than anywhere else, it will lose GDP, wages, jobs, investment, and the dollar will fall. All that, and no one could even tell the difference between Paris with Australia, and Paris without.
Clearly Australian negotiators at the UN are incompetent on a whole new scale. If they had Australian’s interests at heart, even a little bit, they would have done this study themselves, and gone to Paris with some realistic comparative data to argue that we are cutting too fast and paying too much. Finalists for most useless Global Negotiator of the Decade are Kevin Rudd, […]
Lately the Five Star Free Market label is just a fake seal of approval for something Unfree
Just as carbon trading has nothing to do with a free market, so it is with monster free trade deals like the TPP. The free market meme won the intellectual debate of the 20th Century, but now its good name gets used and abused to sell the idea it defeated — bigger-government.
A real free market deal has only one page and a bunch of signatures. But it takes a lot of pages to list all the unfree parts and to spell it out in sub-sub-clauses that hurt or help thousands of businesses around the world. Who gets the sweetest deal out of the complexity — the card carrying networkers — those who schmooze up to the right minister or bureaucrat. The people who compete on price or quality alone would win in a real free market, and so would we as customers. Instead the document rewards the gatekeepers, the rulemakers, the industry with the best lobbyists and the monied set who can donate enough to the right causes to get a better deal.
Tipping the scales at 5,544 pages […]
This is what economic growth means, and what some regressives fear so much.
How much would money would you have to be offered to give up the Internet for the rest of your days?
We are all rich beyond the wildest dreams of yesterdays Kings.
Thanks to The Fund for American Studies.
9.5 out of 10 based on 53 ratings
Something suddenly changed in December last year in the world’s second largest economy (some say it’s the first). For the last few years private investors in China have been running away at a faster and faster pace. Apparently, no one wants to invest in the Chinese economy except the government, and six months ago, the State launched a rocket.
The massive growth of China is partly thanks to rampant money-printing. Say hello to Malinvestment. The Chinese economy is sick. It’s distraction time. Anyone want to stoke a war?
…
I saw the graph on the ABC news last night thanks to Phillip Lasker. The original graph came from Bloomberg under this unlikely headline:
China Proves Doubters Wrong For Now as Credit Boom Stokes Growth
“Stoking Growth” is not always desirable — to go biological — cancer “stokes growth” and so does Ebola.
“The amount of cash Beijing is shoveling into the economy is stunning,” said Andrew Collier, an independent analyst in Hong Kong and former president of Bank of China International USA. “Given high fixed-asset investment among state-owned enterprises, it’s likely most of it is being consumed by the inefficient state sector. This […]
Michael Harris, Senior Fellow in the School of Economics at University of Sydney, has the impossible job of defending the monstrously ineffective carbon tax against the pointless-but-efficient “Direct Action” program. The carbon tax cost $15b, and cut emissions by 12 million tonnes. The Direct Action plan cost $660m, and is projected to save 47 million tonnes.
Having no numbers remotely on his side, Harris goes quantum semantic. Watch the leap. A tax is not a cost, only a transfer. That makes your tax bill so much easier to pay:
There is also a difference between costs to the economy, and transfers within it. The amount of revenue raised through any tax is not a cost; it is simply a transfer from one “pocket” to “another”. The money has not been destroyed, and it remains available to be spent on something.
Now it seems to me that if I buy a beer, it’s a transfer from one “pocket” to another pocket and if that money is destroyed in the process, that would be the end of the bottle shop. The world of economics rather depends on that money not being vaporised and being available for the shop owner […]
UPDATE: The bottom line. Meh.People are calling it “brutal”, and saying it’s a slash and burn budget, but really government spending will only shrunk by 0.5% of GDP.
[The Guardian] “The government is cutting overall spending, but relatively slowly – from 25.3% of GDP to 24.8% next year, 24.7% in 2016-17 and rising to 24.8% again in 2017-18. By comparison Peter Costello’s first budget was much more savage, cutting government spending from 25.1% to 23.9% of GDP.”
The Australian 2014/15 Budget has just been released. It’s the first budget of the Abbott government. (Catallaxy has the transcript of the speech). Given election cycles there will probably not be a better opportunity to move towards a smaller, less burdensome government. Are the cuts enough? [UPDATE: No].
How much unnecessary tithing is there to the carbon monster?
There are some good signs: 16,500 public service jobs will be cut. And “70 government agencies will be scrapped or merged” including the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). Depressingly, while this is useful, it’s not much. There are apparently so many government agencies no one can figure out the exact number. There are estimates it’s close to 1000.
UPDATE: From News.com […]
How much is that company worth? You can look at its PE, debt, market spread, sovereign risk, and discounted cash flow, but in the end, it’s the Ben Factor (BF) which dominates all companies, metal prices, and sovereign currencies in the West.
The Ben hath spoken, and said that in future, if the economy is looking better, he might slow the printing of $85 billion US dollars a month, some indefinite non-specified day. All that was … obvious. But, world-wide investors and traders hang off the words, trying to second-guess what the BF banality implies. No one will say it, but everyone knows that it the rate of the flow of easy cash so much as slows, all hell will break loose. Balanced on this thin veneer of pretense, stocks, metals and whole national currencies change direction within minutes.
The Ben has spoken.
What hath changed since yesterday? Not much. But global paroxysm ensues.
Bernanke taper talk sends markets into a tailspin
Closing Bell: S&P 500 posts biggest fall since November 2011 on Fed’s stimulus plan
EMERGING MARKETS-Latin American stocks tumble to four-year low
China, Fed frenzy send Aust […]
Brilliant. The country-and-western economic thesis. It’ll catch on. So much for those Keynsian doctorates.
Ray Stevens, composer, comedian, singer. 🙂
We’re printing money
Obama Money
Let’s do what the government does, it works for them, it might work for us, so I forgot my ethics and morals and swallowed my pride We took out every credit card we could get and took out the maximum debt
5.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]
Lord Christopher Monckton compares the cost of action with the cost of inaction and finds that even assuming that the IPCC estimates are correct, that would be far more expensive to reduce CO2 than to pay to adapt to the potential damage. He compares 8 case studies of carbon trading schemes, as well as wind-farms, and even a bicycle-hire program, and finds that costs vary from $90 tr -$101,000 tr per degree forestalled. By Garnaut’s own discount rates, the global abatement cost would be 2.3-4.5 times the inaction cost. — Jo Nova
7 out of 10 based on 3 ratings […]
It’s fairy-land economics out there. In a big economic advance, the Labor Party realized that they can solve world poverty: the secret is to take money from the big producers, and hand it to anyone and everyone — it will not only keep our national economy productive and efficient, but millions of people will be richer! Why we didn’t do it 50 years ago!*
Millions to be ‘better off’ under carbon tax
Think of the possibilities! If it works on a national scale, why not go international — how much richer would we all be if we buried our five cheapest sources of energy in a pit under Maralinga, forced everyone to use the sixth, seventh, and eight best sources of energy, AND we took the profits from the most efficient successful operations around the globe (known henceforth as “polluters” (sic)) and gave them to all the world’s poor and needy?
Where do Gillard and Combet think the “Big-Polluters” get their money from? Would it be from:
(a) giant Swiss-bank-accounts held by Nazi war criminals, (b) ancient Saxon wishing wells, or (c) pots at the end of the rainbow?
Do they think the big-polluters pull money out […]
Carbon credits are a form of fiat currency, yet as calls for carbon trading grow, ironically, another fiat currency collapses—destroying life savings, wiping out jobs, and taking down historic institutions overnight. […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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