Insanity is, as Albert Einstein himself told us, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Which brings us to the Labour Party’s idea for British housing.
Recommendation 2: Retrofit almost all of the UK’s 27 million homes by 2030 to the highest energy efficiency standards feasible for each building to reduce domestic heat demand by 23% relative to current levels.
We’ve actually done this before. Twice. So why are we expecting a different answer this time?…
See MoreCoin Hines never has understood the most basic economic points. This failure to grasp here is a real doozy though. He’s banging on about insulating all the buildings in the country again. As if we’ve not tried various forms of that. Both here and in Oz it led to the most awful bodge jobs – the creation of mushroom farms out of terraced housing for example.
But much more than theory or haggling over technical details, we have excellent empirical evidence that a Green New Deal just does not work.
It is a major part of the Green New Deal and all such atttempts to make the world safe from climate change. Housing must be properly insulated, there must be none of that movement of air from outside to inside – nor vice versa. Because only then will we be using our own body heat to warm up a place. If there’s those openings to the Great Outside then we’ll end up boiling Flipper in those fumes from the last ice floe.…
See MoreRichard Murphy, the would be architect of the Green New Deal, tells us that the whole thing could and should be financed by Green Bonds which will pay 3% interest. Because that’s just not available anywhere else.
But suppose the Green New Deal was funded by Green ISAs, backed by a Green Investment Bank and paying 3% a year – which is almost impossible to get anywhere, but which has almost no net cost to the government as a means of funding right now.
This is not the mere abuse that we so delight in around here, this is actually a serious question. Just how damn stupid do you have to be to get pensions saving this wrong? The assertion is that all the savings that go into pensions just go into savings. They don’t create any new investment, are therefore economically valueless. We must therefore insist that pensions savings – or at least the tax privileged forms – can only go into new investment, not just into savings.…
See MoreThat the Green New Deal isn’t the way to deal with climate change is obvious. The proposal comes from those we wouldn’t trust to run a whelk stall so why would we entrust the global environment to them? And more accurately, we already don’t vote for them to run housing, the economy, industry, or anything complex and more difficult than diversity advice.
The main thing wrong with that Green New Deal being that it’s a vastly expensive, thus inefficient, manner of dealing with the actual problem before us.…
See MoreFrom elsewhere on the subject of the Green New Deal and other methods of dealing with climate change:
Think on it. The Green New Deal is giving Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a $93 trillion checkbook and hoping she gets it right. That would not work out well.
An alternative:
If you change prices with a carbon tax, however, all 320 million of us gnaw away at the bone of this problem. Many of the things we try won’t work, but some will.
Some people just never learn, do they? The latest example being that climate change treaties and plans are now 0 for 3 in the US Senate. And given that it’s the Senate which has to pass such things that’s not a great record. But we’ve got this latest described as just a sham. For, of course, we know full well that the country is just crying out for the social justice that will be ushered in by AOC’s Green New Deal.…
See MoreA claim in the Guardian that we’re all being condescending when we claim that varied progressive policies – akin to those being put forward by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez – are unworkable. The thing is though, some ideas put forward by such progressives are unworkable. As are all sorts of other ideas of course.
For example, we cannot gain both local power without long distance trade and also renewable power without fossil fuels or nuclear. Because renewables are inherently intermittent and the only way that we can deal with that is flatten out that variance over large – very large – geographical distances.…
See MoreThat the Green New Deal won’t cost $93 trillion is obvious enough – no one’s going to pass a bill or series of them that will cost that much. It’s still a useful number though because it does indeed insist, by simply existing, that people start to say how much it will cost. And the problem here for proponents of the Green New Deal is that it will cost more than other methods of attempting to solve the same problem.…
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