It's all there in Smith you know, really, it is

By means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries.

At which point why would we desire to encourage domestic production of things we can get cheaper and better from elsewhere?

Giant greenhouses will be given planning permission under a “grow for Britain” strategy to be unveiled by Boris Johnson, to end the UK’s reliance on overseas food.

Why? Some parts of the world don’t require the greenhouses. So, we should go get our food, as our wine, from there.

It is understood that food the UK has the climate and expertise to produce needs to be increased as the country only produces, for example, 23 per cent of the cucumbers and 15 per cent of the tomatoes supplied domestically.

It is also hoped the rising cost of energy for farms can be helped by making use of surplus heat and CO2 from industrial processes, and renewable sources of energy.

Why do we desire to move to a more energy intensive food system, especially given climate change worries? This has been extensively studied too:

Tomato consumption has increased fast in Europe over the last decade. Intensive production techniques such as heated greenhouses and long-distance transport overcome seasonal constraints in order to provide year-round fresh goods. However, studies that evaluate seasonal and off-season production are scarce. Here, we analyzed the carbon footprint of tomato production systems in Austria, Spain, and Italy using a life cycle approach. We collected data from four main supply chains ending at the point of sale in an average Austrian supermarket. We aimed to identify hotspots of greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production, heating, packaging, processing, and transport. Our results show that imported tomatoes from Spain and Italy have two times lower greenhouse gas emissions than those produced in Austria in capital-intensive heated systems. On the contrary, tomatoes from Spain and Italy were found to have 3.7 to 4.7 times higher greenhouse gas emissions in comparison to less-intensive organic production systems in Austria. Therefore, greenhouse gas emissions from tomato production highly depend on the production system such as the prevalence or absence of heating.

Grow tomatoes in England in that short part of the year that the sunshine can take the strain, otherwise ship ‘em in from Spain. This being something that the price system already tells us, that Smith tells us from 250 years ago, the way the industry works right now and therefore we’ve got the muddleheaded saying we must change this?

How did we end up with the grossly partial - partially informed and partial as to what the answer should be - determining where tomatoes should be grown? We’ve even that absolute proof that just leaving it to the grocers and the farmers already produces the correct result.

Not just how did we end up with these people doing these things but how do we stop them doing so?

Changing fashions in wasting taxpayers' money

Governments will always find ways in which to waste taxpayers’ money, but the fashions of how they do that change with the fads and fancies of each age. Twenty years ago, it was being spent on five-a-day officers, real nappy officers and walking officers. Some councils even had officers to go around reducing the number of holes in the salt shakers at fish and chip shops in an attempt to cut down salt intake. Maybe in some places money is still spent on such things.

Today, however, the fashion dictates that it must be spent on things such as decolonization, gender language modification, diversity awareness and ‘unconscious bias.’ Some even pay to have their staff attend courses in critical race theory and ‘white guilt.’

This is all in Milton Friedman’s fourth quadrant. You can spend your own money on yourself, your own money on someone else, other people’s money on yourself, or other people’s money on someone else, which is the fourth quadrant. Since it is other people’s money, the cost does not concern you all that much, and since it is being spent on someone else, the quality is not paramount to you either. This is basically the public sector of the economy, in which legislators and bureaucrats are spending taxpayers’ money on other people.

Because it is not their money, they can spend it like water on fashionable causes, and are prone to be influenced by minority pressure groups urging expenditure on things that matter to them, rather than to the population at large. The general public probably regards these fashionable causes just as novel ways of wasting money.

Given these endemic pressures, it might be thought that little can be done to curb wastage, but there are ways of minimizing it. One is surveillance. If there are organizations exposing it and highlighting it, with media doing the same, it is exposed to mockery, and Government Ministers will order it to be curtailed to avoid the embarrassment of allowing it to happen on their watch.

It can also be curbed by having departments focus on the priorities, the things that matter. By establishing a scale of priorities, they can concentrate resources on what is important, rather than on what is not. This process must be done publicly, under scrutiny, and in consultation with the public at large by the use of reputable polling organizations. Once this is done, it will be difficult for Ministers in the Commons to defend spending money on the fripperies rather than on the things that people think are important.

During a cost of living crisis, when the population has to cut back on unnecessary spending, it is important that government plays its part, and is seen to play its part, by doing the same.

Logic's not a strong point when folk talk about food and farming

Minette Batters should be able to do better than this but of course the brief she’s trying to follow doesn’t make sense either. “Give NFU members more money” is her message but that’s not really something that does make sense. So, she’s left with this sort of nonsense:

…the president of the National Farmers Union, Minette Batters, said ambitious proposals to help farmers increase food production, first put forward last year by the government’s food tsar, Henry Dimbleby, had been “stripped to the bone” in a new policy document, and meant farmers would not be able to produce affordable food.

Batters said she had told the PM on Friday that farmers – including those in the West Country seat of Tiverton and Honiton, where a crucial byelection will be held on 23 June – were furious with post-Brexit policies that they believed would make them poorer and leave them unable to compete with foreign producers.

By definition if the food being produced in Britain were affordable then there’d be no problems with competing with foreign producers. Because they’d not be cheaper than the affordable home grown stuff, would they? And if British farmers can;t produce affordable food then fine, we’ll take that competitive foreign produce then.

Then there’s this delight:

His method was hailed by organic farmers as a blueprint to make Britain self-sufficient in food without compromising on the environment, and helping farmers to transition from intensive farming.

But by definition intensive farming produces more crop on the same amount of land. That’s what it means. So how would Britain grow more, on the same amount of land, by using a less intensive form of farming? It’s abject nonsense.

Logic seems not to be one of the things concentrated upon when talking about food and farming.

These people aren't being remotely serious now, are they?

Fracking is a fairly important question. In the standard - that is, the IPCC that we’re all working from - models that RCP 8.5 is the one where it all gets out of hand and accelerates. That’s also the model in which we do not exploit unconventional gas and oil and so retreat back to coal to power society. As long as we don’t do that then the varied models that are left produce chronic but entirely manageable problems from climate change.

Note that this is the output of those standard models being used to describe and predict the entire subject. This is not some oddity from us, it’s right there, right at the heart of the predictions being made.

It’s also true that fracking will require some drilling pads, there will be - very light - seismic effects and so on.

It’s possible to hold different views on the relative importance of these things. But any decision does require that the decision makers be serious:

The billionaire's bid to produce gas in Britain was dealt a blow this week when the Secretary of State for Levelling Up overturned approval for Ineos’s planning application for a fracking site near Rotherham.

The company had been seeking to extract rock to examine the concentration of shale gas on the site. The company aimed to frack on the site at a later stage.

But the Government has refused planning permission over concerns about plans to construct a three-metre fence around the well to reduce noise from drilling on the site.

Department for Levelling Up cited Mr Gove’s concern the structure would impact the "openness" of the Green Belt Area.

Ineos had been asked to construct the barrier by local planning officers and would have removed it after extracting the rock for testing.

These people are not being serious in the slightest, are they? We would go further, this is the action of buffoons bringing the entire idea of representative democracy into disrepute.

Could we, just possibly, return to a system in which the adults make decisions?

In which we agree with Mr. Chakrabortty

Right in front of our eyes, Britain’s entire political order is being demolished

That sounds rather excellent, doesn’t it? A political order that taxes supply in a time of dearth - the only criticism being that it does not do so enough - would seem ripe for demolition.

From housing to health, the institutions are crumbling. This could be a historic chance to craft radical change from chaos

We are radicals so, yes, bring it on!

What turns these symptoms of acute crisis into a chronic national breakdown is, as Lord Hill says, the rottenness of our political institutions. So profound is their decay that they can no longer properly face the problems, let alone tackle them.

Super. So, to borrow a phrase, What is to be done?

Which is where we disagree with Mr. Chakrabortty. For his clear intent is that we should have a different politics, driven by different politicians. This, to us, doesn’t make sense if it is the institutions themselves which are rotten and undermined. The answer is to stop using the institutions - to stop using politics as a method of societal management.

Yes, of course, there is still a role for government, someone must organise the bins being taken out and so on. But our radical vision is that we simply stop using those rotten and undermined institutions. Return the management of life to where it always should have been, the subject of voluntary interaction among the people, not something demanded nor directed from on high.

That is, Mr. Chakrabortty is arguing for a different politics. We demand less.

This is a vile argument for a £15 minimum wage, tantamount to evil

This might not be the wisest argument ever:

Workers deserve a pay rise, and we should be fighting for a £15-an-hour minimum wage.

We’re worried about a wage/price spiral so let’s raise wages. Hmm, perhaps not.

As to why it’s £15, this is just taking the American idea of the Fight for $15 and bringing the nominal number over. Despite Britain being a poorer country, with lower overall wage levels and using a different measurement - £ instead of $ - to boot.

The government actually employed an American professor - Arindrajit Dube, both a leader in the analysis of minimum wages and someone fully in favour of higher than the US one at present - to study what the minimum wage “should” be. The answer being that anything above the 55 to 60% level of the median wage was harmful. That’s when the unemployment effects become significant that is. Further, the correct wage to be using as the reference is the full and part time median wage, not the full year, full time one (we checked all of this in direct correspondence with Prof Dube).

This means that the currently proposed £10.50 is in fact “too high” by the standards of proper economic analysis (median hourly pay apparently being £14.10 for all employees, so the minimum is being set at 74% of median). And that’s analysis by someone in favour of both the minimum wage and quite high ones too.

Setting the minimum pay above median is really not sensible at all. But we did say that the argument is vile and to us this part of it is:

Even accounting for the increase in public sector wages, the government would still be £25bn per year better off from the change, as a result of spending less on universal credit payments and collecting much more in income and other taxes.

They really are saying that the poor should be taxed more to pay for government. That this is good, that more be taken in tax off those who are earning, by the very definition of what a minimum wage is, the smallest amount that it is moral someone be paid for their labour.

We’ve spent the last two decades arguing that the taxation of the poor should be reduced. In fact, that the personal allowance and also starting point for national insurance should be that very minimum wage itself. We partly won that argument too - the current £12,500 target for both is what the full year, full time, minimum wage was when the pledge to raise the allowances was first made.

We therefore repeat our full and initial insistence. We’re not in favour of there even being a minimum wage. But if there is to be one then the full year, full time, minimum wage must be equal to the tax and national insurance allowance. Equally, whatever the tax free allowances are must be that minimum wage.

The moral case in favour of a minimum wage is that this is the minimum labour is worth. OK, fine, so government gets none of it because that’s the minimum that labour is worth.

After all, if you want the poor to have more money then stop taxing them so damn much.

There's planning and then there's planning

This story rather perks up the ears of those of us raised on the hard scifi of the past:

China has accelerated its ambitious plans to build the world’s first solar power plant in space, aiming to launch two years ahead of schedule in 2028.

A trial satellite will be sent out to orbit at an altitude of 250 miles which should absorb and beam solar energy back to specific locations on Earth, or to moving satellites.

That energy will have to first be converted into microwaves or lasers, before being sent on to a new destination.

There’s no particular reason why this shouldn’t work. There’s definitely more than a modicum of tricky engineering in it but the real barriers are economic. Cost to orbit - something coming down rapidly - will be the major determinant of the cost of power at the end of the entire process.

There’s also a modicum of planning here. Yes, Chinese govt etc, someone’s got to plan how many 3/8th left hand screws there are and so on. But the planning is within the operation to make the operation happen. Once built the thing will have to compete with all of the other methods of energy generation out there. The ship will have to sail upon the sea of the markets.

Contrast this with activities closer to home. Gas boilers should be banned because that will “provide certainty for investors in greener alternatives”. No, we don’t see that. If alternatives are better then they can pay their own way - if they’re not then we don’t want to use them. Or “ The EU has paved the way for all smartphones to be legally required to use a USB-C port for charging” By settling on that one standard of course the EU is preventing any new or other standard from emerging. Technological advance is prevented by no one being able to set sail on that market sea. And for the daily trifecta, boards must be 40% female: “We also know that more diversity in boardrooms contributes to better decision-making and results. This quota can be a push in the right direction for more equality and diversity in companies.” If this is true then we don’t need quotas. Because those companies with the better results from their diversity will outcompete the worse and so the market will take care of the issue. Quotas are only required if it’s not in the corporate self-interest that is.

We most certainly wouldn’t try to recommend the Chinese system in its entirety but that one part of the world still understands what markets are for - to allow the experimentation to see what works - and another seems to have forgotten is interesting we feel. Possibly even why one part of the world has been growing at 8 and 10% annually while the other struggles to manage 2% in a good year.

Markets allow experiments. Planning stops them. Which really brings us back to Bernie Cornfeld’s question - “Do you sincerely want to be rich?” If so then we require a market based economic system don’t we?

Fancy that, prices work do they, even for gas?

An interesting little story here:

The UK is producing almost a fifth more gas than last year, boosting efforts to wean the country and its European neighbours off Russian energy.

Production of gas in Norway has also climbed 10pc year-on-year, according to Bloomberg data analysed by Bank of America. North Sea drillers in British waters have produced 17pc more gas so far in 2022 than in the same period last year.

UK production in early June is running at almost 100m cubic metres (mcm) per day, after falling to 40mcm last summer.

Bank of America analysts said UK production had recovered from a “horrific” 2021 following a collapse in prices one year earlier and tougher environmental rules.

If people can make more profit from doing something then they do more of that thing? Gosh, now that is a surprise.

The political reaction to which is that those profits must be taxed off everyone so that they stop this damn producing more stuff in the face of dearth.

Politics is indeed an often counterproductive method of running things, isn’t it. Especially since this point is featured on pages two and three of every introductory economics textbook ever in that nice little set of supply and demand curves. Presumably no one in politics has ever read one or, possibly, believed it.

The Problems with Net Zero Nuclear Strategy

The following is an entirely fictional, hypothetical email illustrating the problems with UK nuclear strategy.

To: Chief Scientific Adviser, Treasury                                                                   

cc: CSA, Government 

From: CSA, BEIS 

Subject: Nuclear electricity generation 

It’s good that our senior colleagues have come around to the importance of nuclear electricity generation in a zero carbon 2050 but the problem is they are still in wonderland. I am writing to solicit your help, and Patrick’s, to get them to understand the realities. This memo is prompted by the Great British Nuclear announcement last month and the funding announcement yesterday. 

I have five concerns and two proposals. The first concern is scale. The former paper claimed that the 24 GW projected will be 25% of 2050 electricity needs. So total electricity needs will be 96 GW. Nuclear in 2019 was 9.3% of the 103GW of electricity supply and electricity supplied 22% of UK total energy needs. In a carbon zero economy, virtually all energy will be electric so, assuming no growth in energy demand, the total electricity need would be about 500GW and 24 GW from nuclear would be just 4.8% of that. We need at least five times that much and without your help, we will not get it. 

My second concern is volatility. We can rejoice that renewables supply 50% of our energy needs but if that is the average of 100% for 183 days and 0% for 182 days, we have a major problem during the 182 days. All my colleagues’ announcements refer to averages and none consider volatility. 

So we need far more nuclear power than your colleagues and mine recognise but when they think of nuclear power at all they think of the 20th century monsters like Sizewell, not the 21st century small and advanced reactors which are transforming the industry. Your colleagues have blocked nuclear development for 20 years largely because they did not want to pay for the monsters at £20bn a go. My third concern is that they are still in that mind set and their recognition of small and advanced reactors is lukewarm at best. So we see a PFI finance model enacted in January which dumps huge extra costs on consumers and approves just one power plant per parliament, maybe. Where is the recognition that small and advanced reactors at, maybe, £2bn a go are affordable by the private sector? We should open this up to competition and step away. Yesterday’s funding paper acknowledges modern reactors but keeps all the decisions in government hands. Firms may apply to benevolent government for grants, but no more. This is daft. 

My fourth concern is excessive regulation slowing new builds. The Canadian and American approval processes are far quicker than ours and take a more pragmatic approach. Of course safety is important but making the Office for Nuclear Regulation responsible to the Health and Safety people gave it the wrong priority and smaller means safer.  The ONR have been talking with international colleagues about harmonisation and are doubtless happy to do so ad infinitum, but are they really likely to sweep away their raison d’être? We do not need 20th C. monster rules for small and advanced 21st C. reactors. 

My fifth and last concern is that the body to speed UK nuclear development is a yet to be appointed quango. Simon Bowen is a good man but he has many other jobs and he is only an advisor. The development of the Covid vaccines showed just how critical it was to have a driving force like Kate Bingham. She was removed from the clutches of the DHSC, and its myriad quangos, and given the authority to single-mindedly get the job done. That’s what we want for nuclear, not another quango. 

My second proposal is to have a committee of top scientists and engineers to bring reality to the Cabinet on zero carbon 2050 matters and to shield the executive in the para above but not to interfere. Advice should be transparent and open to peer review. 

Should we meet with Patrick soon to discuss this?  

So, the ULEZ is grossly counterproductive then, is it?

The Guardian reports that it’s actually tyres, not ICE exhausts, which produce the pollution:

Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show

This makes the ULEZ worse than useless, it’s counterproductive:

“Tailpipes are now so clean for pollutants that, if you were starting out afresh, you wouldn’t even bother regulating them.”

Oh, right.

But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs.

Gosh, that is interesting. So, in order to reduce pollution in London we should be banning the heavier, EV, cars and encouraging the lighter, less pollution producing, ICE ones.

As ever, because of course, public policy is exactly and entirely opposite to good science then.

True, there is still that little point about CO2. But this evidence indicates that the continuation of the use of the internal combustion engine - because of weight - is desirable. All that’s necessary is to produce synthetic petrol by the upgrade of green hydrogen and we’re done. That also saves all of those costs of having to rewire the entire country to charge EVs. Of course, it also means that that idea of banning the sale of new ICEs is nonsense as well.

Is politics going to do that? Rescind the ban on ICE sales? Not just reduce but eliminate the subsidies to EVs, those more polluting vehicles? Reverse the way the ULEZ works in order to actually reduce pollution in London? Of course we know the answer to those questions, politics isn’t going to do that - is it heck.

For politics isn’t driven by actual science nor even by good sense, which is why politics is such a foully bad way of running anything, isn’t it?