Month: July 2019

MMT Could be Used to Pay for the Green New Deal

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By Joel O’Bryan PhD – Re-Blogged From WUWT

NPR news is running this story on Green New Deal financing by writer Scott Horsley:

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rolled out her “Green New Deal,” calling for clean energy, universal health care and guaranteed jobs, one of the first questions she got was: How do you plan to pay for it?
The New York Democrat argued that ambitious programs can easily be financed through deficit spending.
“I think the first thing that we need to do is kind of break the mistaken idea that taxes pay for 100% of government expenditure,” Ocasio-Cortez told NPR’s Morning Edition in February.
In doing so, she shined a spotlight on a once-obscure brand of economics known as “modern monetary theory,” or MMT.

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Study: Pacific Islands Will Survive Climate Change

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

Who could have imagined that islands which survived rapid sea level rise at the end of the last ice age have no problem coping with changes in sea level?

Media Release, From: University of Auckland

Pacific atolls can adapt to rising seas and extreme storms – new study

Low-lying Pacific islands in atoll archipelagos such as Tuvalu, Tokelau and Kiribati are likely to adapt to the effects of climate change rather than simply sink beneath the waves, a new study shows.

A beach at Funafuti atoll, Tuvalu, on a sunny day. Author Stefan Lins, source Wikimedia
A beach at Funafuti atoll, Tuvalu, on a sunny day. Author Stefan Lins, source Wikimedia

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Central Bank Folly: Blame The Boomers…

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By Michael Ballanger – Re-Blogged From Gold Eagle

“Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper.” – Ayn Rand

The baby-boom generation, of which I am a less-than-proud member, blew it.

There was a time long, long ago when the mention of the word “baby-boomer” evoked a sense of pride of membership. Amidst the prosperity of the post-WWII era, birth rates in North America soared while the sons and daughters of many men and women that fought in the war became the dominant demographic force by the year 1966. When I was in Grade 10, I wrote an essay that pointed to the defining moment where the excitement and unbridled optimism of the Space Race, advances in modern medicine, and unparalleled economic growth was snuffed out forever by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas in the autumn of 1963. With the end of Camelot, the boomer generation suddenly began to question things. They threw away the Beach Boys “Surfin’ Nirvana” lifestyle to the darker messages of Bob Dylan, CSNY, the Doors, and Hendrix as they watched while the Viet Nam war claimed over 58,000 U.S. servicemen and caused massive civil unrest to permeate the inner cities and the campuses of America.

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Energy Storage System Cost Benchmark

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By Roger Caiazza – Re-Blogged From WUWT

One of the biggest issues with plans to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy is intermittency. At some point that can only be addressed by energy storage but tracking down those costs is difficult. I recently found a recently released report from the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL): “2018 U.S. Utility-Scale Photovoltaics-Plus-Energy Storage System Cost Benchmark” that provides information that can be used to estimate the costs of the energy storage option.

According to the NREL summary, authors Fu and Margolis, along with fellow NREL researcher Timothy Remo, provide NREL’s first cost benchmarking of energy storage and PV-plus-storage systems. The abstract for the report states:

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Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #368

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The Week That Was: July 20, 2019, Brought to You by www.SEPP.org

By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project

Quote of the Week: “It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”– Richard P. Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

Number of the Week: Three Ways

The Greenhouse Effect – The Scientific Method: This week marks the 50th anniversary of humans landing on another celestial body, and their eventual safe return. The event is justly being celebrated in many ways, including recognition of the hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians, and workers involved in the Apollo Mission and its success. Of special note are the Human Calculators, mostly women, who performed the tedious calculations of the trajectories involved, with precision. But most importantly, the Apollo Mission was a brilliant example of rigorous application of the scientific method, and its importance of expanding knowledge of the physical world.

Today, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is claiming we are in a “climate crisis” which is leading to extinction of a million species and is a grave danger to humanity. Its special report “Global Warming of 1.5 ºC” in October 2018 stated:

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Reading the Next Recession

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Bu David Haggith – Re-Blogged From The Great Recession Blog

Here is a journey in photos and facts to compare the present Great Recession with the past Great Depression to gain perspective on where we might be headed.

Just as we had two great world wars, we might have two great depressions, the last of which we started out calling “The Great Recession” because, at the time, we didn’t know where it would end up or how long it would continue. Remember that World War I did not start off being called WWI. It was originally called “The Great War.”

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The Reasoning Behind Gold’s Breakout

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By Alasdair Macleod – Re-Blogged From Gold Money

Gold’s dramatic move above $1400 has caught the investment establishment by surprise. Physical gold ETFs, as a proxy for direct portfolio investment, amount to only 0.05% of the estimated $250 trillion of global investment values. As well as being badly wrongfooted, investment managers have little understanding of the role of gold as money, believing it to have no role in the monetary system. They will have to undergo a rapid re-education. This article addresses their common misconceptions.

Introduction

One month ago, gold made a dramatic move above a three-year consolidation (delineated by the pecked lines in Chart 1), confirming for technical analysts that a bull market in gold dating from the December 2015 low at $1,050 is alive and well. Chart 1 shows that a basing process has actually been in train for over six years, highlighted by the lower rectangular box.

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