Heat pumps (Shock, Horror) use Electricity!

This just has to be a No Shit, Sherlock moment for the hapless central planners of our funny little economy.

For the otherwise unenlightened, the backstory is that, due to Clean Air fixations, wherein chimneys emitting smoke are deemed to be a Bad Thang, there is a movement afoot to replace open fires and old wood fires, with 'clean' heat sources. And to encourage the masses, there are Gummint Subsidies to make a switch. (Bad puns, I've told you before. Sorry, Ed)

Heat pumps are a huge beneficiary of this move.

Oh dear, they cause a switch from sustainable, carbon based fuels (trees, unnerstan?) to electricity. Where peak load is generated from gas and coal. Nasty, dirty stuff, accordin' to some.

Which (spare generating capacity) NZ is rather short of at the minute. Double oh dear.

And heat pumps, particularly those of the reverse cycle persuasion, can also Cool. Cool pumps use power too! Damn, that wasn't in the Planners Plans! Folks were just meant to Heat with the things...And they Cool things in Summer, when electricity generation raw materials were traditionally stockpiled for Winter. Triple oh dear.

Funny, whodathunkit, them Central Planners never saw any o'this a'comin'.....

And you'd have to prise the remote controls for all them Heat Pumps from consumers' cold dead hands.....

Earth Hour = Soft fascism

Couldn't agree more with This (ht Tim Blair). While I'm wholly in favour of reducing consumption (and am well ahead of the curve, in that I have LED lights drawing 1-3 watts each as downlight replacements), I abhor the collectivist pressure inherent in EH.

And there's a less-well-publicised aspect to dimly lit precincts and premises that you won't hear about anytime soon from the promoters: they are, quite simply, crime magnets.

Earth Hour = A'robbin' we will go!

Little Boxes

The proposal to streamline the building industry consents etc process is gathering steam. Not PC has easily the best summary of my views - planners, who needs 'em? They don't have anything to say about boats or cars. So why houses?

Bearing up

Great thread here, where the comments throw up all the usual suspects. And the lead paragraph is just it: what Were they thinking? Scapegoat time, methinks....

My own take on things is that of a Bear of Very Little Brain:

Sadly for conspiracy theorists, the US debacle is much simpler, much more widespread, and much more worrying. There are four underlying causes:

1 - the US has for many years spent rather more than it has earned, hence a continuing and chronic deficit which must be funded with Other Peoples Money.
2 - the Greenspan years encouraged cheap credit, with a built-in 'buy now, pay later' incentive, which has become entrenched in consumers' minds, especially as they figured out that there was an ATM bolted to their house value, and kept going and punching its buttons. And cheap credit = price bubbles.
3 - financial institutions have re-discovered leverage (but in a new way, because it's Different this time), and have used it to unprecedented heights (or widths, or depths, pick your metaphor). Bear's book assets supported a 32x multiple of business...and the variety of option and Adjustable Rate mortgage products was all too tempting.
4 - accounting leniency (especially the Qualifying Special Purpose Entities - QSPE's) allowed most or all of this financial wizardry to exist outside conventional balance sheets, reporting requirements and other regulatory safeguards. The mess was out of sight, out of mind.

So this Ponzi (meaning, dependent on new suckers coming in and paying cash) edifice is what's coming apart before our eyes. There are a lot of 'unknown unknowns':

- because of the opacity of the QSPE's, and of how to value the cross-linking chains of financial instruments, no-one has any real grasp of where the financial bodies are buried, or how many there are. And most everyone has a cellar. Thus when another cellar is excavated and another crop of recently deceased is uncovered, the vital element of mutual trust is further eroded. 'Who's next?' is the whisper.

- the Fed is out of ammo: it's treating this whole thing as a liquidity issue, and pumping in money. That merely fuels inflation, while leaving untouched the real issue: solvency. The off-balance-sheet junk is coming back On.

- real assets such as houses, which have become well overpriced in traditional household-income-to-phouse-price multiples, are returning to the safe zone of 2.5-3.5. Rather suddenly.

- there is a flight to 'safe' havens such as Treasuries and commodities. Unfortunately, as money floods in to commodities such as wheat, gold and oil, which are all highly supply-inelastic, the old rule of supply and demand kicks in and prices rise. And as oil and wheat etc are our grocery bills in raw form, guess what's happening to them...

If you can recognise li'l ol' NZ in some of these conditions (the chronic deficit BH rightly fingers above) then, yes, we should be worried, too. But we are a commodities maker (food, gold and to some extent oil and gas) so may be well placed to take advantage. And we have some of the best accounting reporting in the world (yes, don't laugh). So we can probably say that our cellars are relatively safe. Maybe a mummified rat or hedgehog. Nothing real bad. Pity 'bout those houses, but.

There has to be a marketing slogan in here, surely?

"NZ - Home of the Lowest Level 3 Asset ratio in the World!"

Really Bad Rhymes

I seem to have been infected by a Rhyming Bug, and to exorcise it, have commented all over a bunch of otherwise blameless victims.

To hell with posterity, here they are, each with their context:


Cullen and tax cuts:

There was an old teacher named Michael
who chortled at down trending cycle
They'll have to vote we back
Instead of that Key hack
Let's nationalise Fisher and Paykel!

Damn Furreners and their money:

A Fly on the wall of Floor 9
Eavesdropped on the Grand New Design
"To hell with the voters -
those ungrateful floaters -
we’ll foobar it all then resign!"

Politicos in general:

A caution for pollies who thirst
for power, and getting in first
for what you intend
may turn out in the end
to obliterate you in one burst

The poor old OBEGAL - Clementine occurred to me almost immediately and I just had to update it:


To the tune of ‘Clementine’. Y’all enjoy, now.

1. In an office, at the Treas’ry
hoping not to hit the wall
Lived a muller, Mickey Culler
and his offspring OBEGAL

(Refrain)
Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling OBEGAL
You are lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, OBEGAL.

2. Light she was, her numbers leery,
And ninth floor did twist them all,
Ten wine boxes without topses,
scandals were for OBEGAL

3. Drove her voters ‘cross the water
As her taxes made them gall,
Hit her lowest polling ever,
Fell into internal brawl.

4. Roug’ed lips above the water,
Blowing bubbles through her shawl,
But alas, Mike was no swimmer,
Neither was my OBEGAL

5. In a graveyard near the Treas’ry,
Where the ngaios often fall,
There grow rosies and some posies,
Fertilized by OBEGAL

6. Listen fellers, heed the warning
Of this tragic load of bawl,
Lower taxes, better praxis
Could have saved my OBEGAL

But, y'all be pleased to hear, I'm better now.

Another climactic known is revealed to be unknown

This leetle bombshell affects, oh, around half the marine organisms in the world. In essence, by omitting the 'assumed in the current paradigm' step of releasing oxygen while consuming carbon dioxide, these organisms have never done a darn thing in the carbon cycle.

That sound you may hear if you listen closely is a whole bunch of Gerbil Worming gravy train riders saying 'bugger' and re-calibrating their GCM's to show that We're All Freaking Doomed, still. Gotta keep them grant shekels flowing.

The shekel quote:

Wolf Frommer, director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology, agrees about the discovery's ground-breaking importance. "If we thought we have understood photosynthesis, this study proves that there is much to be learned about these basic physiological processes."

Overwhelmed by a Gust from Gaia

ht: smalldeadanimals

Black-Scholes = Black Hole

My math is far too weak to follow Black-Scholes, but it's been the standard paradigm for pricing of exotic financial instruments for a quarter of a century.

No longer.

Ever since I read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'Black Swan', and bought/read his 'Fooled by Randomness' I've had this intuition that there was a big soft spot right underneath the main pillar of the financial establishment. The article notes that, in supplying a plausible mechanism for pricing exotica, Black-Scholes also prompted a massive surge in their supply. Now, we know it was all based on a mirage.....

The fool's bandag-ed finger goes wabbling back to the fire.

Pre-emption: that's the ticket!

The always indispensable Spengler has done it again, with a piece about the wisdom of getting in your retaliation early. And of course the appeasement rhetoric of the ArchBish gets yet another hammering.

As Warren Buffet has siad, it's not until the tide goes out that you can tell who's swimming naked. And with a harder, colder, wind blowing through the world, Spengler's piece is a reminder that there are only bad and worse choices in foreign policy: no good ones. Europe and the UK have a very bleak demographic future, as Mark Steyn and others have repeatedly pointed out, and one has to be pessimistic about their ability to rouse the will to pre-empt anything.

Interesting times...see these places while you can.

Solar is subject to Moore's Law

This piece (ht: Instapundit) is a useful reminder that the good ol' entrepreneurial business is the way forward. Earnest Gummint committess won't cut it. Bit like the UN in Darfur - no skin in the game, so no real incentive to step in and help.

Moore's law: explanation here - capability rises/price halves roughly every 18-24 months. Works for me.

The money quote:

"You may not like their politics, or their attitude, or their style. But if we really do have an energy revolution in this country and free ourselves from our addiction to fossil fuels, it will be because of hard-charging, take-no-prisoners entrepreneurs like T.J. Rodgers — not UN committees, environmental groups, or government officials."

I plan to fully solarise my house in 2-5 years time. Like, net grid-producer, not consumer. Bye-bye to power bills, and much more resilience. There is a host of up-and-coming firms making thin-film solar, and the grid-tie plus feed-in-tarriff contractual stuff is starting to get worked on by the more aware power companies.

I thus don't fret too much about the lakes, the need for more power stations burning whatever - plutonium, coal, natural gas - or the State of Fear pronouncements about pylons, wind power or draining Gaia of all her internal heat via geothermal take.

The Sun will do it for me. Oh wait. It seems to be cooling. Toyota!

If daisies are your favourite flower

The dear sainted Archbishop of Canterbury does seem to have gottem his fluffy self into a spot of bother with his all-too-public musings on sharia law and its applicability to England. Having been to High Wycombe for a radio station client, I had actually rather thought it (sharia) was there in all but name, but no matter.

Anyhoo, this little gem of an extended Burma Shave sign did flash past a couple of days ago. Burma Shave is one of my very fave Tom Waits tracks, a Desert Island Disc, in fact, and the original Burma Shave signs were pure poetry and humour.

It does occur to me that one of BS's original verses can probably be updated for the Bish:

If daisies are
your favourite flower
just keep suggesting
burqa power

Weather cooling?

I follow Anthony Watts, and he's come across this, from the wonderfully named Joe Bastardi. JB sees a re-run of the early-50's pattern of a La Nina which stopped the global warming (which had peaked in the '30's) in its tracks.

Yup, we need to be more worried about cooling than warming. As someone who actually farms for a living notes, one nights cooling can kill your crop. One night's warming never can.

And as NOAA has just noted, this January of 2008 has been 0.35 F cooler than the 20th century average.

Hmm. Add a quiet sun (check the sunspot count and then go figure the Chilling Stars theory) - quiet sun, cool Earth.

Oh, and coolist or warmist, don't forget to Be afraid, be very afraid. After all, a State of Fear is the default setting for the zeitgeist, no?

By the Shadow of our Hand

A chilling but essential read for all who harbour Pollyanna thoughts about the Long War. Belmont Club has always turned out excellent analysis, and the comments thread is simply breathtaking. Especially Zenster. Plus there's a link to dear Steven Den Beste, on Triage.

Compare this thread with the pathetic namecalling on, say, DPF's comments threads. Pick almost any one. Sigh.

Some GDP perspective

I've always been a sucker for maps, and this one (ht: Gods of Copybook Headings) is a bewdy. Yup, we're about the size of the US of A's District of Columbia. Oz, OTOH, is Ohio.

The VooDoo Bucket - Level 3 assets under FAS-157

It all sounds very technical, but it is quite important.

Find out (if you're a shareholder in a bank, financial instituion or even a pension fund of any description, and with KiwiSaver, that's most of us) what value of institutions' assets are in the Voodoo bucket.

There's a most useful primer here, and a bearish article from Asia Times online here.

Because until we know (a) where the financial bodies are buried and (b) that they're really dead, and cannot rise up and, like zombies, cause further mayhem (recall that all these toxic products are highly leveraged, so the risk of chain or domino effects is very real), the uncertainty and the negative sentiments will persist.

Capitalism is nothing if not sentimental, y'know.

That good old stuff

Stewart Brand should need no introduction: Whole Earth Catalog, and a personal favourite: How Buildings Learn.

Edge mag invited a whole bunch of folks to say what they changed their mind about in 2007. Guess what our Stewart came out with? Good Old Stuff Sucks. The obligatory quote:

"The Precautionary Principle tells me I should worry about everything new because it might have hidden dangers. The handwringers should worry more about the old stuff. It's mostly crap."

Do not go Gently into that Zero-Sum Night

Something I'd read ages ago, updated here by the always-estimable Martin Wolf of the FT, and commented by Naked Capitalism.

If there is a crunch or three coming along (energy use, global cooling cos' of Chilling Stars, various tragedies of the commons), we humans won't react all that well. Fights. Wars. The line which best sums it all up:

"People fight to keep what they have more fiercely than to obtain what they do not have. This is the “endowment effect”.

Hmm....

The Food Channel strikes again

This little anecdote has to be one of this season's LOL hits....

How's about:

a huhu grub inside a
rifleman inside a
tui inside a
pigeon inside a
blue duck inside a
little bush moa inside a
New Zealand eagle

I'd just be exerting my customary/culinary/cultural rights.

Oh dear. Some of these here boids seem to have been extincificated.

Culinary rights clearly have a Lot to Answer For.

No, wait. Some of 'em went west during the Little Ice Age. So we'll blame a lack of Globble Warmening.

No, wait...

Woo-Hoo. No Really. Solar panels at $USD0.30/watt

This is just the best news. Big award, for a deserving company.

With current solar at around$USD3-5/watt, buying say 2 or 3 kw of panels is economic madness, particularly when you do the conversion to the Kiwi Peso. Best price I've seen for silicon is around $NZD9/watt. Times that by, what the hell, 3000, and that's a lot of pesos.

No more.

Nanosolar (hmm, I seem to have figured this out early this year) is just, according to the money quote from the PopSci award linked above, "putting down factories instead of blathering to the press and doing endless experiments. These guys are getting on with it, and that is impressive."

And at say $NZD 50c/watt (once supply gets here, say 2009 - Nanosolar have a lot of pre-committed sales), why, that 2-3kw of solid generation you need, looks suddenly quite affordable. $NZD 1,500 for thin-film, versus $NZD 27,000 for silicon - well, I think dat's what dey call a no-brainer.

To be sure, there will be conversion efficiency differences, and other factors which will make the thin-film look less rosy. But there's a lot of wiggle room in that price diferential, to soak up these factors. Even if the thing ends up just being one-quarter of the silicon price, instead of well under one-tenth, the outlay is not too much of a stretch for households.

And that's the secret. really. Widespread adoption. Bring it on.

Abiotic Oil - Gaia's fruit after all?

This is the latest (and, to my mind, clearest) statement about the origin of Oil - it ain't a 'fossil' fuel at all, according to those contararian Ruskies. It's a natural product, created deep within the Earth and slow-erupted up into the crust. Where it can be found by following geological signs, but just not the ones the Western scientific world tends to use.

All this rather does blow a big hole in Peak Oil theories, and indeed in any theory which treats oil as a finite resource. According to the Asia Times article (and I guess, to the book behind it) by F. William Engdahl, the Russians have followed an abiotic-origin theory since Wegener's time - the 1930's. They find oil where Western geological wisdom says there shouldn't be any.

So cars, SUV's and other devil-spawn are going to have four energy sources in future:

1 - oil, the natural, Gaia-created product of the deep
2 - hydrogen - and note the recent breakthrough in making this directly from plant starch
3 - electricity - I'll have a Wrightspeed, please
4 - Liquid fuels with similar energy density to petrol, from biomass

Who says that science isn't fun? Or that it can't save us (yet again - remember that hysterical old ninny Paul Erlich, anyone? "The edge of the crisis - we describe our first encounters with the age of scarcity and outline the greatest threat in the immediate future: the food crunch" - chapter One heading from "The End of Affluence", 1974).

I'll take Science over State of Fear, any day.