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July 2022

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Warning From Australia’s Power Crisis Green mandates cause shortages, as Canberra takes over the electricity market.

By on July 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-warning-from-australias-power-crisis-green-energy-anthony-albanese-11655659465?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Australia’s new Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has promised to ramp up green energy, but a national electricity crisis is showing that fossil fuels are hard to drop. Oz’s power crunch offers a warning for America’s political class, if it’s willing to listen.

Australia’s grid operator in June suspended the national spot market for power to prevent looming blackouts. Regulators ordered power generators using fossil fuels when they could run while also fixing prices. The grid operator last week lifted market controls but warned they could be reimposed if prices spike.

Australia’s climate left blamed the mess on fossil-fuel companies manipulating markets. Sound familiar? Some accused coal generators of deliberately withholding power to drive up electricity prices to boost profits before they are forced to close by climate regulation. As usual, the real culprit is bad energy policy. Australia has plentiful gas reserves, but it lacks the pipeline capacity to transport the fuel to metropolitan areas in the nation’s south. Coal still generates about 60% of Australia’s power, and renewables make up a third. The latter is about as much as in California, which is experiencing similar power shortfalls.

Renewable mandates in Australia have made it harder for coal plants to turn a profit. Many have shut down. Others skimped on maintenance, though they are stressed from powering up and down to back up renewables. Meantime, coal and natural gas prices are surging globally amid the war in Ukraine and economic recovery from the pandemic. Weak solar and wind output at the start of Australia’s winter has also squeezed power supply.

This confluence of events caused Australia’s spot power prices to spike, which prompted its grid operator to cap wholesale prices. Coal and gas generators couldn’t cover the cost of their fuel. Predictably, they throttled production, which set the stage for the recent market suspension.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Cancel Culture Goes to Washington George Washington University must change its name, says an article in, yes, the Washington Post. By Allen C. Guelzo

By on July 2nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cancel-culture-goes-to-washington-slavery-emancipation-freedom-history-president-11656699767?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

George Washington is a problem for George Washington University, according to the Washington Post. For years, the university in the nation’s capital has struggled with the shadow cast by President Washington’s ownership of slaves. In 2020 university officials began investigating the school’s sports teams’ name, the Colonials, because of the “ways colonists ravaged communities of color.” Last month “Colonials” disappeared. This spring, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Caleb Francois, a senior at the school, insisting that the university deal with “systemic racism, institutional inequality and white supremacy” by dropping the Washington name completely and renaming the university for Frederick Douglass.

George Washington certainly did own slaves. In addition to the 10 he inherited from his father, he accumulated another 65 through outright purchase over the years. When he married Martha Dandridge Custis in 1759, she brought another 84 slaves to the household at Mount Vernon. By 1786 the slaves numbered 216. In 1799, the last year of his life, Washington owned 317 men, women and children. Even in the years Washington served as the first president, he kept at least eight slaves in his home in the first capitals, New York and Philadelphia.

Nor was Washington necessarily an easy master. He punished four slaves for their “pranks” by selling them to the hell-on-water of the West Indies, and he approved the whipping by his overseers of the “very impudent.” When Ona Judge, one of the dower slaves Martha Washington brought with her to Philadelphia, bolted for freedom, Washington tried (in vain) to re-capture her. As a cure for his endless dental problems, he yielded to the persuasions of a French dentist in 1784 and paid his slaves for nine teeth to be extracted from their mouths and implanted in his.

Yet Washington’s time was also the Age of Enlightenment, when the classical hierarchies of the physical and political worlds were overthrown, to be replaced by the natural laws of gravity and the natural rights of “Nature and Nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence put it. Labor ceased to be a badge of subservience, and commerce became admirable. As commerce and labor gave people a greater sense of control over their lives for the first time in human history, slavery came to be seen as repugnant and immoral.

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