"No such thing as a low-energy high-income country"

A gentle reminder for everyone: You may have a low-energy low-income country or a high-energy high-income country ---- but you will go a very long way to find any place with that link reversed.

How the world's climate promises became a new way to keep Africa poor

 

"[The world] today says ... 'Net Zero by 2050. ... 

"Banks sign net-zero pledges and quietly stop funding energy projects in Africa (while continuing to fund the exact same projects in America, Canada, and Norway). The African Energy Chamber has a term for this: financial apartheid.

"Meanwhile, NGOs run campaigns ... to pressure Western financiers out of ... a project Uganda and Tanzania are building to export their own oil. The European Parliament actually passed a resolution against it in September 2022. ... And every quarter, investors publish sustainability reports full of net-zero targets that have almost nothing to do with whether anyone in sub-Saharan Africa can turn on a light. 

"Africa is responsible for about 4% of global CO₂ emissions. Four percent. No serious calculation says that cutting off financing to the continent that contributes the least will change the trajectory of the climate. ...

"Back home, 600 million people on my continent don’t have electricity.

"The WHO estimates that cooking with wood and charcoal kills around 800,000 people a year in Africa from the smoke alone, most of them women and children. 

"The solution is LPG, which comes from natural gas, but building the gas infrastructure to distribute it gets caught in the same net-zero 'logic' that chokes everything else.

"Nigeria sits on some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world yet its power grid collapsed again in February 2026. At Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in 2025, three ICU patients died during a blackout because the hospital had gone days without power. Twenty-six percent of health facilities across sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity at all. And the people signing those net-zero pledges in London and New York will never know their names.

"No single bank executive decided to keep Africans in the dark. But the world's net-zero pledges created a structure where not funding African fossil fuels became the easy, compliant thing to do, and funding them became a career risk. ...

"I grew up in Senegal, and I remember my grandmother cooking over fire because there was nothing else when the power went out. Cutting off Africa’s energy doesn’t save the planet. It just guarantees that the next generation grows up the same way mine did.

"That’s what I’m working to change through Prosperity Not Poverty — because African nations have the right to use their own resources to build their own futures."

~ Magatte Wade from her post 'The Lie Keeping Africa in the Dark'

Who's to blame for high power prices? It's the usual suspects, of course.

"[I]it frustrates me that our politicians have become victims of short-termism and tribalism. ... But those with the biggest chequebook in town are still responsible for the decisions they make. And this includes 100% responsibility for our high power prices.

"Why are politicians to blame? Because they retain 51% public ownership - and 100% control - of our three biggest power companies - Mercury, Genesis and Meridian.

"And, since they were listed on the stock exchange, no subsequent Government, blue or red-led, has allowed the gentailers to raise the money required to meaningfully expand the supply of power. And this has meant higher power prices. It’s a simple supply and demand thing. ...

"[S]uccessive Crown Ministers have become addicted to the juicy gentailer dividends. Treasury estimates them to have been a combined $5.4 billion since listing. Quid quo pro. And successive Governments have (cunningly) left any political fallout from higher power prices to be their successors’ problem.

"There is a horrible irony in all this. Politicians, with 51% ownership and 100% control of the gentailers, get to blame their management and directors for our high power prices. But, as the majority owners of the gentailers, it’s actually their fault. It’s like your manager making a mistake, but publicly shaming you.

"And there is only one loser in all this: everyone who pays their power bill. ....

"[We have neither] 100% Government ownership of our power companies ... [nor] 100% private ownership. ... Instead, we have a horrible middle ground. 51% ownership by the Government -- with 100% control -- yet starving them of the capital to increase power supplies. Yet, if you were to believe the politicians, high power prices were the greedy gentailers’ fault. Rubbish. ...

"Make no mistake, high power prices are 100% the fault of our successive governments, blue and red. They’ve been starving our power companies of the food they require -- capital -- while also milking them for dividends. Ask any dairy farmer how that works out."

~ Sam Stubbs from his op-ed 'Who should we blame for high power prices?' [Emphasis mine]

Not so sunny solar

I've been reading an 

RNZ investigation [that] has found that [Luxon's] ministers were presented with clear evidence [sic] that rooftop solar is now among the cheapest sources of electricity households can access; that upfront cost is the primary barrier to uptake; and that Australia's rapid expansion was driven by more than $11 billion in state subsidies. But [that] the coalition government [here] chose not to follow the same path. ...  

[The investigation says that] one in three Australian homes now ... [have solar panels installed] saving those families an average 40 percent on their electricity bills each year ...

As part of their work, officials prepared detailed material comparing New Zealand's approach with overseas subsidy regimes, particularly Australia's small-scale solar and battery incentives.

[Documents released to RNZ under the Official Information Act ] noted Australia's "solar revolution" was aided by $11.5 billion AUD in government grants, which reduced upfront costs by 30% and allowed the industry to achieve massive economies of scale.

Total cost to Australians then, if subsidy covers only 30% of the cost of installing rooftop solar, is $38.3B billion AUD (a subsidy to wealthy home-owning Australians of almost $1000 per Australian taxpater).  Which the "investigation" says has reduced prices for those 1 in 3 subsidised Australian families by an average of 40%. Not a great return for all those billions, I would have said. 

Note that Australia's entire peak demand is roughly 35,000 MW. So at a typical capital cost of ~$1.5–2M per MW, if one were to spend that $38.3B on, say, a system of Combined Cycle Gas Turbine plants, then Australians could theoretically have built enough extra gas capacity to supply the whole country!

Or, maybe, spent those billions on something else. (For that money, going to those already wealthy enough to afford the cost of installation, you could have around 300 new schools, or 30 new hospitals, or one hell of a tax cut ... )

Meanwhile, in New South Wales, this morning, here is where power is coming from ...

What does this mean? It means that to have reliable power, Australians need to build duplicate capacity anyway for when the sun is not delivering. That's the main problem with unreliables.

So much for that "clear evidence."

Offshore emissions

"Can someone explain how the deindustrialisation of the UK and Germany [et al] will save the planet? 

    "I still struggle to understand why they sacrifice their industries, jobs and prosperity only to outsource production to Asia, which increases global emissions. Does it make any sense to you?"

~ Michael A. Arouet

"The UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe" [updated]

"A recent story on PBS NewsHour, 'UN says world must jointly tackle issues of climate change, pollution, biodiversity and land loss,' by Tammy Webber of the Associated Press (AP), reports on a new UN 'Global Environment Outlook' that repeats the false assertion that the Earth is nearing a global tipping point that can only be avoided through “unprecedented change” and trillions of dollars in new spending to phase out fossil fuels. These assertions are bogus, lacking any basis in data or observable evidence. In fact, the UN has a long track record of failed disaster predictions tied to climate change, going all the way back to 1989 ...

"A history lesson is in order. This is not the first time the UN has announced that 'we’re running out of time.' In 1989, 36 years of global warming ago, the UN Environment Programme’s Noel Brown told the Associated Press that 'entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels' if global warming was not reversed by the year 2000, predicting up to three feet of sea-level rise by then, massive coastal inundation of Bangladesh and Egypt, and a wave of 'eco-refugees.'

"More than three decades later, each of these predictions have proven, not just false, but wildly inaccurate. The 'Climate at a Glance' website’s 'Sea Level Rise' page documents long-term tide-gauge records and NASA satellite data showing global sea level rising at about 1.2 inches per decade, with, at best, a modest acceleration since the nineteenth century. Nor have we seen the millions of 'climate refugees' that the UN forecast. The Maldives are still above water, Bangladesh has more people than ever, and the “10-year window” to avert disaster has been rolled over so many times it could qualify as a wrecked vehicle.

"PBS/AP never mentions this failed track record. Nor does it acknowledge that the UN has now presided over 30 Conferences of the Parties (COPs) without changing the basic trajectory of global emissions or global temperature ...

"The entries at 'Climate at a Glance'’s on 'Deaths from Extreme Weather' and 'Temperature-Related Deaths' highlight a crucial fact PBS never mentions: over the past century, climate-related deaths have plummeted by more than 95 percent, even as global population has quadrupled and temperatures have risen. Independent analyses, such as HumanProgress’ review of disaster mortality, show climate-related deaths falling from about 485,000 per year in the 1920s to fewer than 20,000 per year in the 2010s, a drop of more than 99 percent on a per-capita basis, as seen in their graph below.

"Th[is] is not what 'running out of time' looks like.

"What the article and the UN report completely ignore is the role that affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly fossil fuels, has played in making human societies more resilient to environmental hazards. Mechanised agriculture, synthetic fertilisers, modern flood defences, air conditioning, and rapid disaster response all depend on dense, on-demand energy. That is why climate-related deaths as documented by 'Climate at a Glance' have collapsed over the past century. Yet the UN prescription, uncritically endorsed by PBS/AP, is to rapidly phase out the very energy sources that lifted billions from abject poverty, based on a track record of predictions that have repeatedly failed to materialize.

"'Climate Realism' has chronicled this pattern for years. 'UNFCCC Climate Report Lies About Its Own Science' points out how UN political bodies routinely make sweeping claims about 'intensifying destruction' that are not supported by the UN’s own scientific assessments, which identify little or no change in most types of extreme weather events and trends in natural disasters. In 'The IPCC’s 1990 Predictions Were Even Worse Than We Thought,' 'Climate Realism' reviews the early IPCC forecasts of rapid warming and sea-level rise and shows how they overshot reality. Despite this, every new report is marketed as the 'most comprehensive ever' and used to justify more urgent demands for unprecedented, wrenching, transformational remaking of the world’s economy and governing institutions.

"PBS/AP could have told its audience that the UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe ...

"By omitting the long trail of failed UN climate pronouncements, ignoring the dramatic decline in climate-related deaths, and treating speculative model outputs as inevitable futures, PBS and the Associated Press badly mislead their audience concerning the true state of the Earth. A truly public-minded broadcaster would carefully scrutinise the UN’s record and available data rather than uncritically regurgitate its latest false alarm report."

~ Anthony Watts from his post 'Wrong Again PBS, UN Is Pushing Another False Climate Crisis Report'

UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg writes in the New York Post:

"The main UN model shows that even if all rich countries were to cut their carbon emissions to zero, it would avert less than 0.2°F of projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing massive hits of up to 18% on rich-world GDP by 2050.

"The ever-increasing cost of climate policy is one reason the rich world is cutting back in many other areas, including aid to the world's poorest.

"That, in part, is why philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a strategic pivot on climate.

"He has laid out three tough truths: Climate change is serious but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'; temperature is not the best progress metric; and we should instead focus on boosting human welfare. [bold added; hat tip Gus Van Horn]

"The end is nigh – not for the world, but for the climate industrial complex."

"The end is nigh – not for the world, but for the climate industrial complex. It has been a decline brought about mainly by the sheer reality of energy economics in the developing world.

"Published by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the “World Energy Outlook 2025” reads like an obituary for the fantasy of global decarbonisation, acknowledging the undeniable truth that nations prioritising prosperity must unapologetically embrace coal, oil and natural gas.

"For years, the IEA and Western think tanks insisted that hydrocarbons were in structural decline, predicting a fatal drop in demand after 2030. Yet in the very document meant to track progress toward realising an absurd net-zero objective, the IEA concedes that demand for oil and natural gas will continue to grow well beyond 2035 and may not peak until 2050.

"The key insight of the IEA report is that emerging markets, excluding China, are becoming the primary drivers of growth in global energy consumption. This is a massive, structural shift. No longer will the trajectory of energy markets be dictated by the policies of Paris, Berlin or Washington but rather by the sovereign choices of nations whose citizens are desperate for better lives."

~ Vijay Jayaraj from his post 'IEA publishes climate-change era’s obituary'

"Why are leading institutions so biased against fossil fuels?"

"Why are leading institutions so biased against fossil fuels?

"Because their operating 'anti-impact framework' causes them to view fossil fuels, which are inherently high impact, as intrinsically immoral and inevitably self-destructive.
...

"Our knowledge system’s opposition to fossil fuels while ignoring their enormous benefits can only be explained by it operating on an anti-human moral goal and standard of evaluation that regards benefits to human life as morally unimportant.

"Outside the realm of energy, an example of an anti-human moral goal at work is the scientists who, operating on the anti-human moral goal of animal equality, oppose animal testing for medical research and disregard its life-saving benefits to humans.

"The primary moral goal of our knowledge system that operates on energy issues is the anti-human goal of eliminating human impact on the rest of nature—a widely-held goal that is often disguised as merely eliminating only human-harming impacts.

"Our leading institutions' attempt to disguise their goal of eliminating all human impacts as eliminating only human-harming impacts by using vague terminology such as 'going green,' 'minimising environmental impact,' 'protecting the environment,' and 'saving the planet.'

"The goal of eliminating human impact necessarily drives our knowledge system’s opposition to cost-effective energy because cost-effective energy always significantly impacts nature.
...
"Our knowledge system ignores the benefits of cost-effective energy because on the anti-human standard, it is intrinsically immoral and its benefits are morally irrelevant.

"Our knowledge system catastrophises the negative side-effects of cost-effective energy because it views Earth as a 'delicate nurturer.'

"On the 'delicate nurturer' assumption, Earth naturally exists in a delicate, nurturing balance, with humans as 'parasite-polluters' whose impact can only destroy it ... 

"The 'anti-impact framework' must be replaced by the 'human flourishing framework,' including the goal of advancing human flourishing ..."

~ Alex Epstein from his post 'The root cause of our leading institutions' bias against fossil fuels'

"Suddenly, the race is on to be skeptical." [updated]

"Everywhere countries are saying they care about climate change but doing the opposite. The EU nations are fighting over their 2035 and 2040 emissions targets, Mexico is borrowing up to keep its oil company afloat, Canada scrapped their carbon tax, and is being 'coy' about their 2030 target. Governor Gavin Newsom just boosted oil drilling in California a year after he described the industry as the 'polluted heart of this climate crisis.'

"Now Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Tories in the UK, is promising to dump The Climate Change Act if she gets elected. Suddenly, the race is on to be skeptical."

~ Jo Nova from her post 'Deniers are everywhere. The race is on to be a skeptic now — Kemi Badenoch vows to repeal Climate Change Act'

UPDATE: 

"Kemi Badenoch has now confirmed that she will scrap the Climate Change Act, along with its Net Zero targets.
    "But will her MPs allow her to do it?"

"...Coal Is a Physical Manifestation of Progress"

 

"Southeast Asian nations that include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam ... [are] an economic juggernaut that will drive some of the planet’s largest growth in [the world's] energy demand. ...

"Each of these economic engines demands reliable, affordable electricity that operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week. ... 2023 witnessed a demand increase of nearly 45 terawatt-hours (TWh), an amount of energy that must be generated, transmitted regionally, and delivered locally on a continual basis. Where did this new power come from? Coal. An astonishing 96% of that new demand was met by coal-fired power plants.

"Let that sink in. Coal, the energy source routinely demonised in Western capitals and at global climate summits, met nearly all the region’s new electricity needs. This reality stands in direct contradiction to rosy predictions of a transition to 'renewables' manufactured by highly compensated executives at elite consulting firms who have spent the better part of a decade selling energy fairy tales to governments and investors.

"Indonesia alone added 11 TWh of coal-generated electricity in 2023, while its electricity demand rose by 17 TWh, with coal meeting two-thirds of this increase. The Philippines generates more than 60% of its electricity from coal, and Malaysia and Vietnam each around 50%. ...

"The wind and solar share across ASEAN remained a pitiful 4.5% in 2023. This minuscule contribution exposes the bankruptcy of consultants’ promises of 'renewables' dominating the regional power mix by mid-2020s. ...

"Oil, natural gas and coal collectively hold the major share of ASEAN’s primary energy mix ... 

"Factories, petrochemicals, shipping, aviation, and agriculture all consume fossil fuels in large quantities. 
ASEAN countries are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to fossil fuel infrastructure that will operate for decades. ... Nineteen projects across Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia, and Myanmar hold more than 540 billion cubic meters of recoverable gas. Countries don’t spend billions developing gas fields if they plan to abandon fossil fuels within the next decade. ...

"These nations aren’t chasing arbitrary climate targets; they’re building the infrastructure of their future and prosperity for people."

~ Vijay Jayaraj from his post 'In ASEAN Nations, Coal Is a Physical Manifestation of Progress'

When I hear warmists whinge about the rocketing cost of living, I think about climate justice.

When I hear warmists whinge about the rocketing cost of living, I think about climate justice.

Why?

Because these are climate activists complaining about the effects of climate activism.

Let's start with the cost of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, capsicums ... you know, all the things now generally grown in greenhouses. To heat them economically, growers use gas. And "because carbon dioxide is a plant food, concentrations of the gas are sometimes elevated in greenhouses to accelerate growth....

...All this requires a lot of energy, making greenhouses vulnerable to climate taxes on carbon dioxide emissions and bans on hydrocarbons, which drive fuel and electricity prices higher.

Government policies have tripled natural gas prices for Simon Watson of 'NZ Hothouse,' a 25-year tomato producer in South Auckland, who says the very foundation of his business is crumbling.

Twenty-five years ago, gas was abundant and we were told it was going to last forever,” said Watson. “It was a wonderful thing.”

But the good times are gone. Natural gas supplies are running out [sic], and rising costs threaten to uproot the entire operation, disrupting hundreds of workers. Watson’s two plants represent about 10% of New Zealand’s 500 acres of covered crops in the upper North Island. He predicts many will have to cut back or close because they can’t afford to pay for gas.

And salad dodgers have to pay too.

Watson points out that 80% to 90% of supermarket products – from meat and dairy to sugary drinks and liquor – rely on gas-intensive processes. The decline in natural gas reserves is pushing prices higher.

As energy commentator Vijay Jayaraj explains, this is an entirely self-inflicted energy crisis.

This manufactured crisis reveals the true cost of climate virtue-signalling – not just in New Zealand but across the globe where similar policies are damaging the agricultural sector. ... The government and the energy industry have nine months to come up with a solution before the high energy demands of next winter make the situation catastrophic.

"Catastrophic" is precisely what warmists were after. So it's funny to see them whimpering now.

You want to ban gas, ban exploration of gas, to price gas off the market? Then, you know, how about sucking up the consequences without whimpering.

But it makes things no easier for the rest of us.

"Yet Another Misleading Report on 'Low-Cost' Wind and Solar"

"In a just-released report, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) claims that renewable energy is the most cost-competitive source of new electricity generation worldwide, The report further claims that '91% of new renewable power projects commissioned last year were more cost-effective than any new fossil fuel alternative” ...

"If those claims sound too good to be true, it’s because they are. IRENA’s boasts ignore a fundamental reality: the intermittent electricity generated from wind and solar is fundamentally different than electricity generated by traditional generating resources that are not subject to the whims of the weather. ...

"The inherent intermittency of wind and solar reduces the physical and economic value of their capacity relative to traditional generating resources, since sufficient reserves or storage must be maintained to meet demand when they are unavailable. Merely reporting total wind and solar capacity misleads because it does not account for the adequacy of the electrical energy generated to meet demand, and the actual costs to do so. ...

"Promoting misleading claims about wind and solar power distorts policymaking and will only exacerbate the growing inadequacy of electric supplies to meet increased demand .... It will lead to more frequent electricity rationing ...

"That may appeal to hairshirt environmentalists, but it won’t appeal to the broader populace ..."

~ Jonathan Lesser from his report 'The U.S. Energy Information Administration Needs to Fix How It Reports Renewable Power Capacity' (hat tip Watts Up With That?)

"Coal is expected to dominate the energy sector for at least three more decades"

"[C]oal is the backbone of energy production, supplying over 70% of India’s electricity. The dark evenings of my childhood have been brightened.

"Other developing countries have learned from China and India how coal jump-starts economies and lifts millions from poverty. Now, they too line up for their share of the fuel that sparked the Industrial Revolution.

"Global coal production reached an all-time high of nearly 9 billion metric tons in 2024. Chinese and Indian output continued to grow, and Indonesia set export records.

"India is on track to burn twice as much coal as the U.S. and Europe put together – possibly within the year – while China has already surged ahead, consuming 30% more coal than every other nation combined. ...

"Coal shipments to Southeast Asia are on a steady climb ... Rising production of South American crude steel will increase demand for metallurgical coal ... African energy production [is] on the rise ... Even the U.K. government, while still parading its 'net zero' credentials, is, nonetheless, procuring [imported] coking coal to keep British Steel alive ... In the U.S., President Trump has prioritised coal under a new executive order ...

"Coal is expected to dominate the energy sector for at least three more decades, barring a disruption by rapid innovation that would enable its economical displacement. Similarly, the mineral will continue to play a crucial role in iron and steel production absent development of a viable alternative.

"Predictions to the contrary are just so much hot air – largely from those most averse to a warming atmosphere."

~ Vijay Jayaraj from his post 'Big, Beautiful Coal Here for Many More Years Despite ‘Green’ Demonisation'

The DEFINITIVE Climate Change Rap Battle

From the folks who brought us the Keynes v Hayek rap battle ...

Live from Davos, it’s your morning update on the future of the planet. Representing the alarm bells and carbon cuts, it’s environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore, but he’s not alone. Enter the unapologetic fossil fuel defender, Alex Epstein, armed with charts, charisma, and a whole lot of hydrocarbons. Just when things start boiling over, in steps Mr. Moderate—Bjorn Lomborg—trying to cool the room with cost-benefit calculations. Is the planet on fire? Are fossil fuels the secret to success? Or is there a third path no one wants to rap about? Tune in, turn up, and try to keep your cool—this is the DEFINITIVE Climate Change Rap Battle.

"Sub-soil privatisation should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century"

“'The case of Guillermo Yeatts (1937-2018) for subsoil privatisation should eclipse ‘climate change’ as the number one policy initiative of the 21st century. This friend of private property, free markets, the rule of law, and civil society, a successful entrepreneur in his own right, a thinker and doer, has set up an excellent opportunity for a new political era in his beloved Argentina.'

Here are some quotations from Yeatts’ book Subsurface Wealth...

“'The history of oil production in Argentina has been characterised by a continuing tug-of-war between the state as owner of the subsurface and private producers in the pursuit of profitable production of the resource. ... The effectively monopolistic position of the federal oil corporation displaced the private sector ... '

"'[P]ublic ownership of the subsurface has been the foundation of a model of forced redistribution of rent in the oil industry. [Government] institutions are the royalties system, public oil production, and the establishment of reserves, quotas, regulations, registries, permits, etc. They have also caused stagnation in the industry and relegated the country’s oil resources to oblivion.'

“'Privatisation … is the institutional change required to reduce risk and allow internalisation of externalities through private, voluntary, and mutually beneficial agreements. Privatisation of the subsurface will ... encourage innovation among surface owners and oil prospectors. ...'

"'This change is about unobstructing minds and freeing them from restrictions. It appeals to the initiative of thousands of surface owners who will discover new business opportunities and new means to obtain profits.'”

~ Robert Bradley Jr. from his post on 'Argentinian Reform: Subsoil Privatization (Javier Milei, meet Guillermo Yeatts)'

PS: It goes for the US too. (See post Transferring Public Lands to Productive Private Ownership Will Unleash America's Abundant Natural Resources) And it would go just the same for us, with our islands' abundant resources. 

"The AI market bubble is a con. People are pouring billions into it, and they're not going to get it back. Most of the new AI companies will go bust."

"'The real golden goose for America’s economic future [claims Preston Byrne at the Adam Smith Institute] isn’t re-onshoring manufacturing by erecting new trade barriers; it’s artificial intelligence.'

"No it isn't [explains a commenter]. The current models don't have any general intelligence, or actual understanding of the data they are manipulating. They are statistical models that note that certain words are statistically associated with other words in their training data (the text contents of the internet), and estimate the probability distribution of what words are likely to come next.

"So it might note that when the word 'Adam' occurs next to the word 'Smith' in a sentence, words like 'markets' and 'economics' and 'trade' will be especially common. It's a lot more sophisticated than that in the s'rt of patterns and relationships it can recognise, but that's basically all it's doing. It doesn't know what 'Adam' and 'Smith" denote. It doesn't know what a market is. It just has a big bucket of related phrases and combinations that people have put together in the past, and it picks them randomly from the bucket and pastes them together.

"If lots of people have written about a topic on the internet, it has a bigger bucket to pick from, and can generate something that is at least originally phrased, repeating the information in those phrases. If it's only been discussed once or twice on the internet, it will reproduce what they said verbatim. And if it hasn't been discussed before, it will make something up that seems plausible. So if you ask it for a biography of Adam Smith, it has lots to choose from. If you ask for a biography of Joe Random, it will select randomly from all the biographies and news articles it has read, which is why people have put their own names in and been shocked to find it falsely accusing them of crimes and scandals.

"If it doesn't know, it won't say 'I don't know,' because fundamentally it never knows. It has no concept of truth. These are not facts about the world. They are strings of meaningless symbols that it is looking for patterns in. So it can never solve a problem that hasn't already been solved and written about on the internet. It doesn't know anything that isn't on the internet. You either get the product of human intelligence regurgitated, or you get sentences picked and put together at random.

"There are some very basic new word-smithing capabilities that it may be able to help with. It can generate summaries and paraphrases, and restructure information scattered across multiple sources to pull out the bits relevant to a particular aspect. It might be usable as a first-pass helpline assistant to answer questions from people who haven't read the documentation. But it can go no further, because it is a statistical model of the text on the internet, not any sort of general intelligence. We still have no idea how to do that.

"The [AI] market bubble is a con. People are pouring billions into it, and they're not going to get it back. Most of the new AI companies will go bust.

"That said, it's their own money to lose, and I'm very much in favour of deregulating it and letting innovation try. You never know. Somebody might come up with an actual advance in the process of all the messing around. But I will note in passing that the main obstacle to doing it in the UK is energy prices — it uses vast amounts of electricity to do the training — so if you want to do it [in the UK], the best thing you could do would be to abandon Net Zero.

"And that's not likely to happen, so as usual, it's politicians talking about how they're going to solve all our problems ('Growth!') while misguidedly doing everything in their power to prevent that."

~ commenter NiV arguing against the post 'AI, not Tariffs, is the Future of U.S. Economic Dominance'

“LLMs [Large-Language Models] are regurgitation-with-minor-changes machines. When a particular prompt is close enough to a bunch of prior data points, LLMs do well; when they subtly differ from prior cases in their databases they often fail. …
    
“As … Brad DeLong just put it in a blunt essay, ‘if your large language model reminds you of a brain, it’s because you’re projecting—not because it’s thinking. It’s not reasoning, it’s interpolation. And anthropomorphising the algorithm doesn’t make it smarter—it makes you dumber.’”

~ Gary Marcus from his post ‘OpenAI’s o3 and Tyler Cowen’s Misguided AGI Fantasy’

"OpenAI launched its latest AI reasoning models, dubbed o3 and o4-mini, last week. According to the Sam Altman-led company, the new models outperform their predecessors and 'excel at solving complex math, coding, and scientific challenges while demonstrating strong visual perception and analysis.'

"But there's one extremely important area where o3 and o4-mini appear to instead be taking a major step back: they tend to make things up — or 'hallucinate' — substantially more than those earlier versions ...

"According to OpenAI's own internal testing, o3 and o4-mini tend to hallucinate more than older models, including o1, o1-mini, and even o3-mini, which was released in late January. Worse yet, the firm doesn't appear to fully understand why. ...

"Its o3 model scored a hallucination rate of 33 percent on the company's in-house accuracy benchmark, dubbed PersonQA. That's roughly double the rate compared to the company's preceding reasoning models.

"Its o4-mini scored an abysmal hallucination rate of 48 percent, part of which could be due to it being a smaller model that has 'less world knowledge' and therefore tends to 'hallucinate more,' according to OpenAI."

~ Victor Tangerman from his article 'Open AI's Hot New AI Has an Embarrassing New Problem'

"The greatest achievement of AI might be in the irony: by oppositional example, it will teach us to love human creativity more than ever. It turns out that human intelligence, while deeply fallible, offers something AI cannot: Sincerity, creativity, and apparently (and for now) a greater degree of old-fashioned accuracy."

~ Jeffrey Tucker from his post 'How Much Can We Really Trust AI?'

"...it's fundamentally poverty, and the solution is to become rich — and that requires using fossil fuels.”

“It's a big mistake on the part of a lot of the media to just focus whenever there's a poor country that suffers from anything that's connected to climate to say, ‘Oh, it's climate change. The solution is get rid of fossil fuels.’ No, it's fundamentally poverty, and the solution is to become rich — and that requires using fossil fuels.”

~ Alex Epstein from his Q+A with students at the John Locke Institute

"So why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality?"

"What leads a country to begin winding down domestic oil and gas production while promoting the use of imported wood – a wasteful and inefficient fuel — for power generation?
    "What leads policymakers to shut down a nation’s last and still-functional coal generating power plant after almost 150 years of using coal and within months arrive at a situation where blackout prevention notices have to be issued to its power generators?
    "The UK is by no means the only Western country to go down this perverse path of deindustrialisation and national economic suicide. 

    "So why are energy policies of leading Western countries afflicted by magical thinking and irrationality? [Because] The Western World is in a hypnotic trance from 30 years of relentless propaganda pushing climate alarmism."

~ Tilak Doshi from his post 'The Irrationality of Western Energy Policies'

"We cannot run an industrial nation only with pressure differences in the atmosphere. Stand up for weather-independent electricity!"

 

We're short of energy in New Zealand because we don't build enough reliable energy production, hampered by the RMA and relying too much on unreliables — so-called renewables, or 'green energy,' which need real back-up energy when sun doesn't shine or wind doesn't blow — and finding it damned difficult even to build these unreliable sometime-producers.

So, we are running short because we're shooting ourselves in the foot by not building enough. In Germany, they're running short because politicians decided to shut down the reliable (and clean) nuclear producers they had, and rely instead on unreliables — and on buying extra from France's reliable nuclear fleet.

So how's that going? A: It's expensive. So much so that German automakers are struggling. And B: well, as Staffan Reveman points out, whatever capacity is cited for unreliable energy production, it just doesn't produce it reliably, if at all:

German #wind power in the first 9 months of the year 2024. [Graph: Agorameter with 1h resolution]

The installed capacity is 70 gigawatts. Wind power delivered everything between almost nothing and

50 gigawatts. We see here that we cannot run an industrial nation only with pressure differences

in the atmosphere. Stand up for ... weather-independent electricity!

In the words of one local, "This country hat nicht alle Tassen im Schrank."

It goes double for us.

Banning fracking

What would be the effect of a US president banning fracking? Alex Epstein has the answer:

Banning fracking would have been one of the most harmful policies in US history. It would have destroyed 60% of our oil production and 75% of our natural gas production.

Why is that important?

Fracking is very likely the single most beneficial technological development of the last 25 years. By extracting cheap, abundant oil and natural gas from once useless rock, it has made energy far cheaper than it would otherwise be.

The availability of food is highly determined by the cost of oil, which powers crucial machinery, and gas, which is the basis of the fertilizer that allows us to feed 8 billion people. Thanks to fracking, the world is far better fed than it would otherwise be.

Given how life-giving fracking is to humanity and how essential it is to the prosperity and security of the US, any politician who has ever suggested banning fracking should be considered an energy menace until and unless they issue a deeply reflective apology.

So does any US presidential candidate want to ban fracking? Hard to know. But there's at least one who did: 

Kamala Harris ... in 2019 said, “There is no question I am in favour of banning fracking,” [and] now tells voters in fracking-dependent states like Pennsylvania that she is no longer wants to ban fracking.

Should we believe her?

They shouldn’t believe her, since Harris’s net-zero agenda requires banning fracking. ... And far from questioning the anti-fossil-fuel, “net zero” agenda, she has remained 100% committed to it.

Which means she’s an enemy of not just fracking but all fossil fuel use.

The guiding energy goal of Biden/Harris is “net zero by 2050”—rapidly banning activities that add CO2 to the atmosphere.

Since there’s no scalable way to capture CO2, burning fossil fuels necessarily means more CO2.

Given that “net zero by 2050” requires banning virtually all fossil fuel activity, the whole conversation about whether Kamala Harris wants to ban fracking is absurd.

You can’t be for fracking and for net-zero anymore than you can be for penicillin and for banning all antibiotics.

So, what about the other candidate? Where exactly does Trump stand?

Frankly, who the hell could know.