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We always hear a lot about the expense and difficulty of decommissioning nuclear power plants, but we seldom hear about the cost and difficulty of decommissioning wind mills, which only last half as long (if that much) as nuclear plants. Especially offshore wind, which is much more expensive to begin with. Here’s one estimate of the future problem:
JOHN adds: Offshore wind is possibly the stupidest way to generate electricity that has ever been devised. Someone should do the math, but I suspect it would make more sense to hire 10,000 men to walk on a treadmill. And liberals don’t clean up their own messes. There are already rotting hulks of wind turbines littering the landscape, often having been installed by now-defunct companies whose owners, long gone, have made off with the profits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the billionaires who have gotten rich on government-mandated wind turbines to take down and dispose of offshore installations that have outlived their insanely brief useful lives. “Green” energy is, in multiple ways, the great scandal of our time.
Right now it seems the airlines (and especially Boeing aircraft) are suffering an epidemic of equipment failures and mishaps. Count me somewhat skeptical. I suspect the Alaska Air door frame blow out a few weeks ago, along with the tire falling off a United 777 the other day, has put the media on high alert, and now many episodes of mishaps and irregularities that might have gone unnoticed or unreported in the general media (the specialty aerospace press is a different matter—Aviation Week and Space Technology was a staple of my household’s magazine subscription pile when I was growing up, and it had lots of neat stories about aircraft problems) and are a source of headlines. (There is a second possibility: that standards for maintenance and manufacturing crews have been eroded on account of diversity mandates. . .)
Here’s the long-term data for mortality from airplane airframe-related accidents:
So Haiti is back in the news. As I mentioned yesterday, I thought the Clinton Foundation had fixed the place! Or Colin Powell in the 1990s. Or something. How soon until Biden sends in American troops? Or lets 500,000 Haitians come to America?
Anyway, Haiti is in the state of nature right now, with gangs and mobs rampaging. And yet, as a smart left-leaning friend of mine (I do have a few of those—opposition research) points out, the murder rate in Haiti is lower than many American cities:
Our pal Mark Perry reminds is that today, March 12, is “Equal Pay Day” that falsely assumes how far into 2024 the typical woman has to work to earn what her alleged male counterpart earned in 2023. Funny how feminists never consider something like “Equal Job Safety” or “Job Risk” day (Mark proposes “Occupational Fatality Day”), because the data looks like this and the “gap” would take years, not months, to close:
Men are 11 times more likely to die on the job than women. A rather different kind of femme fatale.
Chaser, FWIW (also from Mark):
As mentioned here before, Democrats used to be fairly robust in their opposition to open borders and unchecked illegal immigration, as recently as the Clinton years. But then someone got the bright idea that since immigration had helped to flip California from a red state in presidential elections to a blue state across the board, imagine how much power Democrats could grasp if the California story was repeated across the entire country! (But don’t dare say “Replacement Theory,” because that’s raaaccisttt. Besides, it is a misnomer: it should be called “Replacement Fact.”)
Here’s what the shift in opinion looks like:
I am sure many readers have noticed how bike lanes are taking over American urban roadways, especially downtowns, often killing a lane for cars, and reducing streetside parking. And I almost never see anyone biking in the lanes. How did this come about? Has there been a massive populist campaign for bike lanes? Has “we need more bike lanes everywhere” been popping up in public opinion polls of top issues and citizen concern?
Of course not. It is an elite preoccupation, crammed down our throat by what I am calling Bike Lane Tyranny. At some point, many cities will reverse course and restore old car lanes. Though it may take a while.
It is the same mentality that has been certain that what America’s cities and suburbs need is more mass transit. Billions have been spent especially on rail lines (when busses would actually be more effective) that are lightly used. And here is the result:
As you may have heard, San Francisco voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed initiative measures to make policing easier and require drug testing for welfare. The horrors! Too bad they didn’t put reparations in the ballot, as I have a hunch how the vote would have turned out. In any case, even progressives, naturally slow learners, are finally figuring it out.
And I know everyone has seen San Francisco’s famous “poop map.” Equally important is the map of the number of businesses in the central core of the city that had enough of the madness. These are all the businesses and retail outlets that closed up and left downtown near Union Square the last three years. Most of the spaces they vacated are still empty.
The term “deaths of despair” has caught on in recent years, brought out into the mainstream from academic and specialized literature such as Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. And the problem of drug overdose deaths was already becoming an issue on the campaign trail as far back as the Obama years. And yet the problem has only gotten worse:
One of the central totems of the modern left and its women’s auxiliary (the feminist movement) is the alleged “wage gap” between men and women. You know the cliche—women only earn 80 cents for every dollar a man earns. This cliche has been exploded countless times, but it refuses to die because it retains endless utility for grievance-junkies who run the Democratic Party. You know the Biden White House will continue to deploy it.
Which makes Mark Perry’s annual analysis of White House salaries under Democrats so much fun:
Churchill remarked that “For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” A similar thing can be said, apparently, for green energy—you can’t subsidize or tax-break yourself to a truly profitable business.
One fine sunny Sunday several years ago found me in Helsinki, Finland, where I spotted a rock bacd setting up in a square by a park, and I decided to linger for some free live music. Who knows—I could be catching the next Abba, or Eurovision Song Contest contestant. Well, it wasn’t any of those. What it was is kinda hard to describe. Best I could do at the time was a heavy metal version of a whale being tortured. And thus this chart makes some sense:
As we have noted repeatedly here, people are voting with the feet and moving from high crime/high tax blue states to low tax/low crime red states in increasing numbers. Alongside tax rates as a factor in higher economic growth in red states is that red states are more likely to be right-to-work states than blue states. This is not universally true; heavily unionized Michigan was a right-to-work for a decade, though that ended last week, thanks to Governor Wretched Whitmer’s fealty to unions. Anyway, here’s the data on the rates of job growth in right-to-work versus compulsory union states:
Yesterday we noted Trump’s rising strength among certain voting groups. How about by profession instead of ethnicity, gender, and the other usual things? Like professions perhaps? Everyone likes to say the political divide in America is between red states and blue states. But it looks like the division is more white versus blue when it comes to who is supporting Trump’s campaign—that is, white collar professionals against blue collar workers.
My pal Henry Olsen explains in his recent Telegraph column that Trump is underperforming his polls in recent contests, and appears to be stuck between a very solid floor and a rigid ceiling. Perhaps, but the Telegraph included this graphic, taken from recent Pew polls, that suggests a different picture:
To be fair, a generic Republican ought to be polling about 60 percent of the white vote, and that’s just where Trump is stuck. It would be a delicious irony if Trump wins in November through an increased share of minority votes. It will plunge Democrats into a crisis.
Right now the unaffordability of housing has become a national issue, and not just one for the two coasts. The fundamental reason for this is the spread of coastal-style over-regulation of housing to the interior states of “flyover country,” which had for decades mostly resisted the over-regulation of housing. Rising interest rates have something to do with this too. In any case, maybe another housing crash is in the works?
According to the polls, the Tory Party over in Britain s heading for a wipeout at the hands of the Labour Party later this year, thereby squandering Boris Johnson’s record Tory landslide of 2019. Has there ever been a greater example of political malpractice in recent decades? There are lots of reasons for this dreadful scene (starting with Johnson’s own terrible handling of COVID and other unforced errors) which can be treated more fully on another occasion. Conservatives in America ought to pay close attention, however, and take some lessons perhaps.
For the moment, it is worth noting is that the Tory Party has especially lost ground among younger voters. Sound familiar? Actually, the Financial Times looked at cross-national survey data, and concludes that Britain’s Tories are an outlier (click to embiggen):
Affordable housing may have something to do with this:
Vaunce News 