Bishop Hill Economist wants Corn Laws back again
Oct 18, 2011 Economics Energy: solar Media The Economist has long been a bastion of liberal economic thinking, with an honourable history of arguing for free markets and free trade dating right back to the Corn Laws. So it's perhaps not a surprise to read the magazine's argument that governments have wasted vast sums in subsidising solar "energy" companies.
Europe’s solar subsidies have proved not just expensive, but also unreliable. As so often happens with such regimes, their excessive generosity has led to a glut of output, and their cost has risen, leading governments to cut rates. Capacity will probably shrink as a result, discouraging innovation.
But then they blew it. Their preferred solution is as follows:
Above all they must fix a price of carbon that gives innovators the confidence that competing with fossil fuels for the long term will be a rewarding, and perhaps hugely profitable, undertaking. If politics prevent them from setting a substantial carbon price, they might consider requiring utilities to have a carbon-free component to their generating portfolios, as happens in many American states.
Yup, let's pick some "winners". It's straight out of the pages of the Guardian.
Reader Comments (48)
The Economist, unfortunately, truly does subscribe to 'liberal economic thinking'. Of the Huhne stable.
I was pleased to read that the sun will never cease to provide energy to the Earth. So much for doom-mongers who claim the sun will burn out eventually.
Ahem.
Sadly, The Economist is not what it was. The analysis has been getting shallower over many years, received opinion is spouted without any independent checking, and even the writing style - once so crisp, authoritative and readable - is now often garbled and vague. It doesn't take much to work out that its staff is now infiltrated by the ubiquitous left-leaning meeja studies grads as the rest of the press.
In the comments the idea that "Big Oil" gets subsidies gets another showing.
When you follow the idea up you see that the "subsidies" in the first world are actually oil companies having clever accountants to pay less tax. Bit like other companies - and a bit like Bono.
so, there are no results , will the EU aparachnik responsible for the fiasco resign and let others try?
Or are they, you know, part of the , you know, system , and live another day to live off our backs.
Ah, The Economist. I cancelled my subscription during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, which they reckoned was a darn good idea.
I occasionally weaken and buy a copy. This week's edition reports favourably on the recent Met Office model which says that, as the world roasts, Britain is being chilled by a cold stratosphere, in turn caused by reduced solar UV. (And so another wicked winter is further evidence of Global Warming, as is a mild winter.)
This week's Economist speaks of "...all the benefits that [solar energy's] carbon-free contribution might bring" and says that "computer models of the climate can be quite impressive tools for working out what is going on" in its sycophantic account of the recent Met Office paper which attributes Snowball Britain to solar UV changes.
Without irony they write that "global warming has made people look to models as predictors of the future". Man, how I yearn for observation to be restored to its place of honour in science. Modelling, however plausible, must be subjected to strict validation.
From the 1846 edition:
Above all they must fix a price of carbon corn that gives [innovators] farmers the confidence that competing with [fossil fuels] America for the long term will be a rewarding, and perhaps hugely profitable, undertaking. If politics prevent them from setting a substantial [carbon] wheat price, they might consider requiring [utilities] British workers to have a [carbon-free] wheat component to their [generating portfolios] lunch, as happens in many autocracies [American states].
Yegods.
We are reaping that which we sowed in the late 1970's. The collapse of education, in particular mathematics (sums), and the acceptance by the largely uneducated populace of a socialist view of the world in which individual rights outweigh personal responsibility.
Nice paraphrase Matt R.
I'd like to know what happened to the Economist. A few years back I enjoyed reading it, and it seemed to advance radical ideas, frequently challenging orthodox thinking. Now it's in the same stable as the Gruniad and the BBC. Can anyone explain to me what went wrong?
It amazes me that you are so incapable of distinguishing your imagined horrors from the real world. Your knowledge of the corn laws and tariffs is pitiful, and your confusion between pricing uncosted externalities and 'picking winners' is embarrassing. Don't they teach Adam Smith in Scotland anymore?
"It amazes me that you are so incapable of distinguishing your imagined horrors from the real world. Your knowledge of the corn laws and tariffs is pitiful, and your confusion between pricing uncosted externalities and 'picking winners' is embarrassing. Don't they teach Adam Smith in Scotland anymore?"
I see.
Frank
Where does this say anything about "pricing externalities"?
Looks to me like they're advocating a pricing mechanism to "pick winners".
> > I'd like to know what happened to the Economist..... Can anyone explain to me what went wrong?
I think the resignation of editor Bill Emmott in 2006 and his replacement with John Micklethwait is too closely tied to the magazine's precipitous decline to be merely coincidence.
David C
I went to University with them. Meeja studies students (and not just them by any means - Law, Social 'Sciences', you name it). Several of 'em SWSO types bent on infiltrating the establishment as part of their Marxist mission. At the other 'pole' were wishy-washy Liberals bent on 'making a difference'. i.e. bending people's opinions to their soft-left Welt anschauung through Churnalism. Most of them weren't very bright or diligent - the SWSO psychopaths were by far the most motivated. But I suspect the malice burning in their eyes put a lot of employers off, until they learned to be better liars. Frankly, at the time, I wasn't a million miles away politically. But I had no option other than to leave Labour when the Hard Left faction took control. They were sinister - thuggish, contemptuous of democracy and happy to use violence. (One of them was in the last UK Govt caucus.)
For a long time I thought the extremism experienced at my two Unis was exceptional, that time would mellow people, and I remained centre-Left. I gradually came to realise that the same doctrinaire commitment those people showed as youths was not maturing. In fact, many of them achieved their burning ambition to destroy pretty much anything resembling normal western society, They're now in their fifties and sixties, and they're still at it. It's pathological. And the takeover of institutions - education, especially - has been effective at brainwashing the less independently-minded underneath them. Which, let's face it, is the majority.
So that's how it happened David C. I had a ringside seat for Student Politics of the seventies and early eighties. They won. But I did manage to put two of them in hospital when they broke into my flat at 4 in the morning with a bunch of Party 'muscle'. Their attempt to show me the errors of my insufficiently-Socialist ways, using metal bars, backfired. They thought I was nice, and I can be. But back then I also had a gift for fighting, and it came in very handy.
Methinks ZedsDeadBed is off his/her meds!
I thought those some of Zed's more valuable contributions.
That's as may be, Geoff. Perhaps complete incoherence is preferable to nonsense one can understand.
To be fair to Zed, it has all the hallmarks of Fraping. But you never know!
Perhaps it shouldn't be Fraped on Bishop Hill, it's not Facebook. Braped/Bhraped? Or, alluding to his Grace, Graped?
Tens of billions. It's incredible.
Remember though, it is the skeptics who are being corrupted by the money they are paid in all this.
The average capacity factor of solar PV in the UK was less than 5% last year. It is better to leave the panels in the packing cases than go to the trouble of installing them on your roof, with all the inherent dangers to your house. Solar PV in the UK is pure idiocy gone mad. That is why a subsidy of 40p is required per unit of solar electricity generated. 40p compares with a cost of about 4p to generate electricity by conventional means. It's economic madness gone mad!
I see someone is being hilarious with my log-in.
Guess some of my comments must have struck home hard with someone.
"For a sober judgement, read the Econopissed" - Private Eye, circa 1960.
This.
At the time, John Micklethwait said in an interview that one of his goals was to move The Economist back into the mainstream - which he has done. The effect has been to make it irrelevant. The Economist used to give information and make points that nobody else was making at the time - they were among the first to support Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist", for instance. But now they don't say anything different from what everyone else is saying.
And as illustrated by the Bishop's post, CAGW has made them sort of schizofrenic. In matters not related to climate change, they still support - or pay lip service to - their traditional free-market positions. Yet they see no contradiction in, at the same time, supporting carbon price-fixing for the sake of something that may happen in 100 years. It amazes me that they don't even seem to notice that that is a logical contradiction: if you believe that a supposed emergency in 100 years is reason enough to suspend the free market, why not apply the same logic to much more urgent emergencies in the shorter term? They are intellectually bankrupt, but they don't even notice it.
It makes perfect sense for leftists to support carbon price-fixing (or carbon targets such as in the UK's 2008 Climate Change Act) since they don't really believe in free markets - at best, they grudgingly accept it as something they have to live with - sort of like Lenin with his New Economic Policy. But for people who supposedly believe in free markets, it makes no sense. Just like The Economist has, sadly, stopped making sense years ago.
Welcome back Zed.
Was I right or was I right? Go on, even you can admit a sceptic is right every now and then.
It is truly tragic what has hpappened to that once entertaining and insightful newspaper (as the Economist likes to be called)
Zed:
'Guess some of my comments must have struck home hard with someone.'
Like being savaged by a dead sheep - and about as coherent.
On the one hand, the Economist is a staunch supporter and believer in............AGW but then even though it recognizes the economic illogicality of subsidising solar power, it still cannot bring itself to think this through to a rational conclusion. Its not even classic 'double think', it is a wholly retarded form of green advocate 'double think' - schoolboy stuff for divs.
I see CAGW as something of a litmus test. A few years back the Economist was fairly neutral on the topic, but over time it has morphed and now it's firmly in the CAGW camp (little different to the BBC etc). And as it has increasingly failed the CAGE litmus test, so too has it's commitment to free market economics...
I see someone has trolled the troll, and the troll isn't amused.
"The Economist has long been a bastion of liberal economic thinking, with an honourable history of arguing for free markets and free trade dating right back to the Corn Laws."
However, what we are seeing here is 20th century Social Liberalism where the good of the community is viewed as harmonious with the freedom of the individual. That which we are experiencing now is an argument raging (oh yes it is) over what is common good. To many, myself included, policies appear to suit non-liberal agendas by colossal interference in the free market while simultaneously closing down debate.
The Economist, in its article supporting carbon pricing, displays the evidence that it is now part of the problem, not part of the solution.
The pall of Malthus
Laid in mourning over all.
Parbati's beast chirps.
===============
Sections of this thread are incomprehensible. Have comments been removed?
Despite its cultivated image the "Economist" is simply the mouthpiece of established "crony capitalist" business not of the traditional liberal principle of free markets. It ALWAYS comes down for the later except when discussing foreign countries that aren't open enough to US/EU companies.
BBD: Yes.
BBD said: "Sections of this thread are incomprehensible. Have comments been removed?"
No, that's just kim's haikus
Good timing, eh BYJ? Just lucky, I guess.
=========
Martin Durkin has another one of his excellent posts up on his site just now:
The Green Superstate - what the global warmers really want
These models of which the Economist piece speaks are fit for enhancing regional weather forecasts by allowing more sophisticated extrapolation from real data collected by satellite and ground stations. I suspect they soon go haywire compared to real data if they are allowed to run for a few days without it. But on the grand scale, that of global climate over hundreds of years, I suspect they are not fit to leave the groves of academe, where they could readily be used for speculations and illustrations of hypotheses, but whose output would not be taken seriously for planning or other practical actions by anyone familiar with their flighty, manipulable nature. No doubt the more lurid model runs might leak to the press, but responsible operators of these models could readily nip media/political alarmism in the bud if they so wished. That they have not done so, speaks to me of gross irresponsibility. In some cases, they have deliberately fueled that media/political alarmism and that is what is most shocking in this dismal era for climate science in particular, and for the leadership of some scientific institutions and societies in relevant fields. The Economist has merely found advantage in the resulting melee for the promotion of its current ideological perspective. As have a great many others.
The older I get (and I'm not yet ancient) the more I value my education : Latin taught me to analyse what I meant and structure sentences; Philosphy of Science, about the difficulty of proof and its relationship to empiricism;and Statistics, about not confusing improbability with causality. I never thought I was particularly well educated until I read what passes for popular science, published science and editorialising. What hope is there for society unless precision, accurate analysis and higher standards of proof are restored as rightful goals, more valuable than advocacy or political positioning?
When they announce "carbon" will be the base for a new global currency, the reasons for this and similar outpourings to the LSE might become clearer.
Struck by this sentence;
Well it would appear in a 'warming world(?)', the brave new world of subsidised renewable energy, that millions more in the UK are being driven into fuel poverty and thousands more are dying in 'cold' homes.
'Rising energy bills causing fuel poverty deaths'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15359312
Such subsidies have resulted in many families, the retired, the sick and the disabled into having to make the choice between food on the table or a warm house.
How can one of the richest and so-called civilised countries in the world be driving the most vunerable in society into making such impossible decisions. That is criminal neglect.
OT But noticed Gavin got a $25,000 AGU award for his communication skills.
http://www.desmogblog.com/why-communicating-science-so-money
"Snake Oil Salesman of the Month" ?
The Guardian - 19 Oct:
David Cameron cast further doubt on the future of a pioneering £1bn state-funded carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on Wednesday when he said the scheme "isn't working".
Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that the final project in the CCS competition, at Longannet, was on the brink of collapse as Scottish Power and its partners, Shell and the National Grid, were concerned about its commercial viability without more public backing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/19/david-cameron-longannet-carbon-capture
simon
Looks like it's back to nuclear then.
Simon
Update on Longannet. It's been cancelled.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/19/david-cameron-longannet-carbon-capture?intcmp=122
'they might consider requiring utilities to have a carbon-free component to their generating portfolios, as happens in many American states.'
Sorry does this actual exist , after all carbon is involved in one way or another in all generating methods I know off. Of course 'carbon price ' would be great idea for those looking to make vast sums out of such markets , lots of city boys would very much like the idea . Now whos the The Economist popular with.
I subscribed to the economist from 1993-2005 or so. Their unquestioning position on CAGW means I won't be coming back anytime soon.