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October 3, 2009

Navajo and Hopi Indians tell environmentalists they're not welcome

Interesting. A very similar thing has happened here in far north Queensland when aboriginal people realised that greenies liked trees more than people, and were quite prepared to stab them in the back by doing deals with the Labor government over the so-called wild rivers legislation.

Effectively, Labor put its political interests, ie its need for green voting preferences, ahead of the needs and rights of indigenous people.

The Wilderness Society was happy to tolerate aborigines in its precious wilderness as long as they stayed poor and didn't get in the way.

It was almost worth it to see aboriginal people protesting outside a Wilderness Society function in urban Brisbane full of the usual white inner-city living upper-middle class suspects. You know, your typical Greens voter
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - The leader of the country's largest Indian reservation threw his support behind the neighboring Hopi Tribe, whose lawmakers declared environmental groups unwelcome on the reservation.

Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. and Hopi lawmakers say environmentalists' efforts could hurt the tribes' struggling economies by slowing or stopping coal mining.
 
Shirley said Wednesday that he will stand in solidarity with the Hopi Tribe, and joined Hopi lawmakers in encouraging other tribes to re-evaluate their relationships with environmentalists.

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Filed under  //   aborigines   economics   environmentalism   green economics   Hopi   indigenous people   Navajo   wild rivers   Wilderness Society  

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July 21, 2009

Which sells better - Ford F-150 or Toyota Camry?

From Tim Blair:
 
When in charge of markets, governments tend to deliver what they think the public should buy rather than what the public wants to buy. Which is how things are shaping up for GM, now under majority government ownership. Last month the carmaker planned to shut its Orion plant:
But a few weeks later, the company reversed course. GM now says it will retool Orion to make compact, gas-sipping cars. The change of heart says a lot about how GM’s new owners – the federal government owns 60% of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) owns 17% – are making considerations other than profitability a top priority for the auto maker.
 
 
Because if profitability were a priority, the Orion plant might be re-tooled to build something even larger than the mid-size sedans it’s currently producing:
As Ford looks to reinvent itself with smaller, energy efficient vehicles they are faced with the stark reality that as of late May their Ford F-150 series continues to outsell the Toyota Camry.
 
Let that sink in for a moment. The best-selling truck in the U.S. still outsells the best-selling car …
 
 
There is a widely-held view outside the US (and within it) that the US auto industry is in crisis due to producing the wrong vehicles – behemoths, when everyone wants capsules. This isn’t so, as even Barack Obama knows. The main problem lies elsewhere, as Mark Steyn has pointed out:
GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.
 
How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around 1600 bucks; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell.
 
 
Solution: keep making the popular trucks, but cut the gigantic corporate socialism. Oh, and appoint Iowahawk as US car czar:

image

Obama – a Hemi man himself, when allowed his choice – is headed in the opposite direction: too small to fail.

 

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Filed under  //   economics   Ford F-150   government intervention   Toyota Camry   US car industry  

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May 23, 2009

Less central role for US dollar a good thing?

Jeffrey Sachs writing in Scientific American thinks so.
The U.S. response to the Chinese proposal was revealing. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner initially described himself as open to exploring the idea; his candor quickly caused the dollar to weaken in value—which it needs to do for the good of the U.S. economy. That weakening, however, led Geithner to reverse himself within minutes by underscoring that the U.S. dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future.
 
Geithner’s first reaction was right. 
Article here.
 
 

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Filed under  //   economics   exchange rates   US dollar   world currency  

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May 22, 2009

How to kill 66,000 jobs

Andrew Bolt

Friday, May 22, 2009 at 07:08am
 

 
Mitch Hooke, head of the Minerals Council of Australia, is amazed the Senate is voting on the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme without knowing how many people will lose their jobs where and when:
While the Government describes its Treasury modelling as the most comprehensive ever attempted, the analysis provides no forecasts on the sectoral or regional employment impacts over the first decade of the CPRS. None at all.... This is economic policy-making with a blindfold on…
 
So we asked Australia’s most experienced economic forecaster—Brian Fisher—to assess the impact on employment in the sector that produces about 50per cent of Australia’s exports. Fisher—a former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics—used the same Treasury assumptions and the same data sources used in the Treasury modelling. Unlike the Treasury, he took into account the global financial crisis…
 
The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected… No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared…
 
You can add to these numbers the jobs of the council workers, the school teachers, the nurses, gardeners, and employees in the hundreds of small businesses in the towns and communities that service these mining regions. Not surprisingly, I consider these numbers should prompt a Government re-think of its CPRS legislation.
 
Yes but I hear you say, what about all those tens of thousands of lovely green jobs that are just magically going to appear to replace those lost?
 
Let me guess, you believe in the Easter Bunny as well, don't you?
 
We are going to destroy thousands of real jobs on the promise of theoretical jobs to be created some time in the future, maybe? You think this makes sense?
 
But if there was already a compelling and sound economic argument for these make-believe green jobs, they'd already be here. No business is going to engage in practices that unnecessarily drives up its costs.
 
At least no business that is going to survive. Bosses are always looking for ways to decrease their costs and increase their profits.
 
So it is clearly implied that the as yet uncreated green jobs can only come into existence if the government rorts the market place by preferentially subsidising them. That is, by throwing large amounts of taxpayers' money at the business men and women involved.
 
So there's the rub. What will it cost to produce each one of these jobs and what does this mean in terms of lost opportunities elsewhere in the economy?
 
There is no magic pudding. If you divert resources from one area of the total economy, then you are starving another area.
 
But what if the area you are starving is actually the more effecient and productive part compared to the one the government has decided to favour?
 
You don't have to be an Einstein (I would have thought) to work out that ultimately this does not make any sense.
 
Does it make sense to chase the fantasy of so-called renewable energy when we know the numbers don't add up and that it is hopelessly expensive and inefficient?
 
There has not been a single gas or coal fired power station decommissioned anywhere in the world despite the vast amounts of money that has already been wasted on wind farms.
 
The reason is simple. You can't relie on wind farms to produce power when you need it.
 
So you've got to keep your conventional power stations chugging away on standby, ready to fill the gap at a moment's notice.
 
For every megawatt of theoretical electricity generation from wind power you need a megawatt of reliable coal or gas (or nuclear) generation as back up.
 
Has anyone tried doing the sums to see what the real costs of green jobs are in terms of real jobs?
 
 

Andrew Bolt

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 11:15am
 

 
A university study into Spain’s world’s-best renewable energy scheme finds that green power kills jobs - and solar power kills most of all:
No other country has given such broad support to the construction and production of electricity through renewable sources....
 
The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 ($1.03 million) to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than €1 million ($1.8 million) per wind industry job… The study calculates that the programs creating those jobs also resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,000 jobs elsewhere in the economy, or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every “green job” created....
 
Each “green” megawatt installed destroys 5.28 jobs on average elsewhere in the economy: 8.99 by photovoltaics (solar), 4.27 by wind energy, 5.05 by mini-hydro… These costs do not appear to be unique to Spain’s approach but instead are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources…
 
The high cost of electricity due to the green job policy tends to drive the relatively most energy-intensive companies and industries away, seeking areas where costs are lower.
The study, by Spain’s Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, should make any fool think twice before pouring millions of government money into solar energy. But not one fool:
Australia is planning to build the world’s largest solar power station, with three times the generating capacity of the California plant that has been the biggest to date.
 
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the photovoltaic plant would cost A$1.4 billion (US$1 billion) and will have an output of 1,000MW - equivalent to that of one coal-fired power station. He said he wanted Australia to be a ‘solar leader’ rather than a ‘solar follower’.
How many jobs did you kill today, Mr Rudd?
 
(Thanks to reader David.)
 
UPDATE
For quick updates on the latest evidence of the planet warming - or actually cooling - bookmark Climate4you, the site of Professor Ole Humlum.
 

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Filed under  //   climate change   economics   green jobs   renewable energy  

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May 4, 2009

Australia's cultural rent seekers

Same tired old, (and not a little pretentious and self-important), justifications below from a sector that imagines it deserves special treatment at tax-payer's expense.
 
Really, the insufferable arrogance of these people! Australians were just helpless acceptors of whatever British publishers decided they should read? What planet is this woman on?
 
We had no "authentic...cultural identity" prior to 1972?
 
In relation to the Australian film industry, you can see the studied and willful blindness that so characterises the cultural left. As Blair points out, there is no shortage of Australian films being made. That isn't the reason that so few people decide to spend their hard earned money on them when making a choice about what to see.
 
No, she'll ignore the very simple explanation - most Australian films are unwatchable self-indulgent rubbish that noone in their right mind would pay to see. Vide stage plays that are little more than leftist agitprop, such as the one that had the luvvies spontaneously orgasming over that had a character clearly supposed to be Peter Costello by any other name giving orders to the Navy not to rescue people on a sinking refugee vessel! I mean, really.
 
As Orwell so perceptively observed so many years ago - only an intellectual could believe that. No ordinary person would be so foolish.
 
And poor Ms Adler obviously doesn't understand the Market. Bit like K R Puff'n'Fluff in that regard. Even evil multinationals want to make money and know that they can only do that if they offer people what they want to buy. It really is that simple out in the real world. But not for folks like her it seems. But then, she's got her own interests to look after
 

Tim Blair

Monday, May 04, 2009 at 04:14am
 

 
Louise Adler, publisher of gibberish, defends the Australian book industry’s cultural protectionism:
Until the 1970s, British publishers decided the reading habits of Australians … With the advent of the Whitlam and Fraser governments, an authentic Australian cultural identity was brought into being by fiat, with the establishment of such agencies as the Australia Council and the Film Commission. Overnight, Australian stories told by Australians in Australian accents were available to Australian consumers.
 
So much for pre-70s Australian writers Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Ray Lawler, Hal Porter, John O’Grady, Banjo Patterson …
By the 1990s, the Australian publishing scene had matured sufficiently to view itself as local in origin and global in practice.
 
What did the “scene” think it was previously? Adler next contrasts the thriving “publishing scene” to the moribund film sce … industry, which only a few words earlier she’d associated with Whitlamite cultural triumph:
We have witnessed the demise of the local film industry. In 2007, Australian films represented a paltry 4 per cent (of which 2 per cent was delivered by Happy Feet) of total box-office revenue. How can it be in the national interest for Australian consumers to be deprived of Australian content?
 
Revenue is a guide to how many people saw those films, not to the availability of Australian content. As it happens, there were many Australian releases in 2007. Almost all of them were rubbish, which is why local audiences avoided them.
The consequences of an open market on the cultural landscape are obvious and verifiable. Exhibit A is surely the local music scene, which has been decimated by the abolition of territorial copyright.
 
The top 100 singles in 2008 contained 20 Australian songs. The top 100 album chart contains 24 local works. “Decimated”?
A marketplace that abolishes the principle of territorial copyright will wind back the clock on a proud and profitable publishing culture, reduce the availability of Australian stories and hand back a monopoly to multinational publishers to make decisions about our market far removed from local realities.
 
Like the “reality” of a “decimated” local music “scene”? More on this fear of alien cultural influences from Bob Carr:
Publishers say they need this protection to support local culture. This is garbage. The truth is Australians will always want to buy good Australian writing.

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Filed under  //   cultural left   culture   economics   protectionism   rent seekers  

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May 3, 2009

The last great Prime Minister of Britain

Andrew Bolt

Monday, May 04, 2009 at 08:27am
 

 
image
 
We are here to celebrate a famous victory and to pay tribute to a great Lady who not only saved Britain but together with Ronald Reagan, ended the cold war, tore down the iron curtain, and enabled millions to escape the tyranny of communism.
Her greatness may be measured by the smallness of her successors.
 
What might she now think of the great spending splurge in Britain, the US and Australia. Lord Forsyth, in a fine speech at Thatcher’s tribute dinner, says it for her:
When Margaret wanted to redecorate the study in no 10 she paid for it herself. She always paid cash and never signed the bill in the members dining room and many of her colleagues who did so were given stern lectures on the dangers of debt and credit..
 
She changed the way people thought about wealth creation, enterprise and the role of the state. Part of her legacy was the destruction of socialism and the creation of New Labour. Today we are back to the 70s in a Britain on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to the meddling excesses of Gordon Brown, the irresponsibility of some bankers and the searing incompetence of the regulators and monetary authorities here and in the United States. Old Labour is back. Margaret’s fixed ropes of sound money, living within our means, controlling public expenditure and smaller Government to release the enterprise of the British people are still in place.
 

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Filed under  //   economics   Margaret Thatcher   politics  

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