Faites vos jeux!

Here we are, the day of the US election: a vote which follows an unusually rancorous campaign in a nation more than normally divided by culture, ideology, and notions of ‘identity’ – real or affected.

To the extent we believe what their advisors have told them to say on the stump or promote in their slick, slanted advertising slots, Trump is the man who wishes to preserve as much of the status quo as possible – for good or ill – while Biden stands as the front half of a curious pantomime horse: a half-century veteran, machine politician who seems to aspire to eke out his dotage as head of the student union of some awfully Right-On, Liberal Arts college. Continue reading

Saturn Devours His Children

A recent Wall St Journal article gave vent to a scare-story full of Underconsumptionist claptrap, carried under the catchy headline: “The Coronavirus Savings Glut”. Ironically, and only a day later, the paper ran a second piece entitled “How Coronavirus Upended a Trillion-Dollar Corporate Borrowing Binge and Kicked Off a Wave of Bankruptcies”.

Huh? Does the Journal think we have too many savings or too few? Who can say? The only thing that is clear is that editorial consistency comes a distant second to clickbait and column inches.

Meanwhile, politicians everywhere have been urging those they have at last let out of Lockdown to get out and ‘spend’ as a means of speeding the recovery. Nor have the various banks’ Talking Heads been slow to chime in with predictably supportive exhortations for their various home governments to adopt policies aimed at ‘driving demand’.

[A version of this article is also available as a PODCAST] Continue reading

Green Illusions

A recent, long post on Linked-In relates the story of how an attempt to set up a business recycling aluminium cans in the city of Toulouse in France failed for reasons of cost, lack of customer appetite, and ultimately out of the sheer technical impossibility of achieving the desired 100% ‘Green Loop’ for which the enterprise – ‘La Boucle Verte’ – was named.

Having delivered a fairly detailed case history of the business itself, the author – ‘Founder and President’ Charles Dauzet – then gives way to an even lengthier disquisition on what he himself describes as ‘the illusion of green growth’; a diatribe in which all the usual tropes of denialism are themselves lovingly and painstakingly recycled, complete with a supposedly telling graph showing that world GDP per capita tends to move in rough correspondence with total oil consumption (a relation which, in fact, shows we are collectively becoming more sparing in our usage).

Since oil is held to be a finite resource (and passing over the issue of whether, if it truly is so in any meaningful sense, it is the only one at our disposal), the righteous M. Dauzet jumps straight to the conclusion that we must abandon the very idea of material progress itself since, one day, we must inevitably exhaust the means to fuel it.

Oh dear!

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Certain, clean & Swiss??

Going into to their 21st May referendum on energy policy, the Swiss find themselves confronted by some dreadfully misleading propaganda – issued not just by the usual motley crew of environmental extremists and green rent-seekers, but also by a government whose own tortuously-constructed programme is at stake in the vote.

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