Keynes Vs Hayek: Round 2

Via Okami, the second Keynes vs Hayek viddie. Notice the trainer in Hayek's corner: Mises. For Keynes? Malthus!



The first video was produced just over a year ago, following President Obama's signing of the stimulus bill in late 2009.

Mark Rawson: Racketeer

Before temporarily retiring from the frontline however, I'm going to take a head-shot at the conceptually hamstrung Mark Rawson.

The bush he does his little war dance around in today's piece is the fact that many native English speakers are linguistically inept. I can recall, some six years ago, overhearing a conversation between two English teachers in which one of them complained of being asked questions on grammar at a then-recent job interview; not only was she offended at her interviewer's expectation that she should be able to answer the questions correctly, but she was bemused as to the expectation that anyone could be so bookish as to know the answers to such esoteric questions as the functional difference between the simple and perfect aspect, or the purposes to which a semi-colon might be put. Similarly, I remember a bulletin-board notice in a coffee shop in Kaohsiung which read: "Canadian, native English-speaker looking for private tutors". In a moment of misplaced kindness, I took her number down and explained her mistake to her.

Yet Rawson's piece is nothing less than a naked call for a "linguistic professionals" racket in which hiring decisions by "internationalizing institutions" are to be forced into compliance with the politically-leveraged diktat of the "linguistic professionals" industry. The TESOL racket is exactly that already - and anyone who feels they need TESOL certification probably needs a lot more else besides that. Even though I have had numerous letters mangled by over-editing in the past three years (most recently here), I would still, of course, oppose such blatant racketering largely as an ethical imperative of the freedom of association principle, but also in order to pour sand on the slavering politicist Rawson.

Byeline

I might well be blogging less frequently over the next few weeks as I will be house-hunting among other things. I've lived in the same apartment for the past three years and have been very happy with it, although the one I used to have in Kaohsiung was very handsome. I'd consider another apartment, but, for various reasons, I'm thinking about a little house (though having recently left my girlfriend of some years now, that might feel strange for a while). I might also try to drop in on the anti-nuclear protest in Kaohsiung on Saturday with a camera and an ear. I have half a mind to go to Hualien to see the airshow the following Saturday, but that's probably going to be too much of a stretch. For now though, I'll just note that Tim Worstall has started blinking at the shadows hugging the trees:

"We might even posit that large scale thorium usage would lead to lots of cheap power and that a devotee of a localised, near peasant, lifestyle like Ms Lucas would prefer there be no solution rather than one which allows the continued existence of a large scale industrialised society."

Yes: this isn't about energy and it isn't even about "climate change" - and it never was.

One Good & Two Half-Decent Editorials

This piece by the strangely named "Derek Scissors" in today's Taipei Times was good - one of the better pieces of analysis published in the TT for some time. Choice quote:

"Using official Chinese data, the state share of investment last year was 38 percent, suggesting to some that the private share was 62 percent... False. What China calls the private sector, plus wholly foreign-owned firms, generated only 24 percent of investment. The remainder is attributable to mixed ownership."

Good stuff. The designation of economic activity in China as "capitalist" or "free market" is a common error which has to be corrected all too often, which itself may suggest that sometimes this is not in fact an error, but a deliberate attempt to smear free market ideas.

J.Michael Cole also had a nearly-sensible editorial concerning related problems viz Taiwan's exposure to what will almost certainly be yet another instance of Gresham's Law revealing itself. I had two comments for him early this morning. The "key point" to those comments, as Taiwanese up and down the island are trained to say, is that the figure he gives for PRC national debt (U.S.$276 billion) is a monstrous underestimate precisely because it does not take account of the size and shape of the loans racked up by the various SOEs and "limited liability" companies which Scissors cut out from the ambiguation of Chinese paper terminology. The real figure is likely to be at least U.S.$2-3 trillion, if not more. That means inflation is coming, and not your average, garden-variety <5% annual type either.

Also in the Taipei Times today was a piece on disaster management, which, although it contained many worthwhile points about record keeping, emergency drills, reaction times and the import of shortening such times for logistical organization, it didn't really follow through on the question of how to realize these obvious priorities. All the authors managed was a short paragraph at the end beginning with the ceremonial flourish:

"We sincerely recommend the government do the following..."

That's not nearly good enough. I can do better than that myself, I did so three years ago, and I'll have to have another go at it again soon.

Tea With Tsai

Christ on a bike... that a fossilized old Lefty like Jerome Keating* can organize a "morning tea meeting" with Tsai Ing-wen is illustrative of the power the western Left has in Taiwan and the utter lack of any counterpoised voice. Some of the questions put to her were just incoherent babble about the arts, the environment and swing voters whilst others, though more clearly enunciated, were too large or controversial to possibly get any precise answer out of her. Not a single person asked her a quantitative question, or a question of epistemic or ethical principle and consequence. Issues of spending, debt, energy, devolution, privatization and military reform were not discussed, which is disgusting, and the whole atmosphere of the thing was far too much like an Eloi alumini party. All they managed to squeeze out of her was seven shades of socializmus.

Oh, and somebody even let Bruno Walther in and babble something unintelligible about the environment for the last question. That was a classy touch.

*Corrected (see comment).

David Friedman On "Sustainability"

As a general rule, I don't like overly lengthy quotations, but I do see or hear things worthy of an exception to this rule from time to time. What follows is one of these - it is an extended quote I transcribed from David Friedman's recent talk delivered at his own University in California, in which he argues against "sustainability" as either empty rhetoric or a bad idea:

"One of the things that people have somehow managed to not pay enough attention to is that over the last twenty years, what people used to regard as the one great problem of the world, and made great efforts with no success at all to solve, has been solving itself - and that problem is the poverty of the third world... If you look at the history of India and China ... roughly from the end of world war two on, the Indian government accepted the advice of western economists, economic development people, which was that if you want to make yourself into a modern country you need central planning, five year plans; in order to develop your industry you've got to put big tariffs against foreign autos and build autos in India at a cost of $15,000 instead of buying second-hand autos in America at a cost of $500... and India basically followed that policy, the people in government were pretty happy with it because it put lots of power in their hands and it meant that while they were explaining that they were doing all this for the good of India, they were doing it in luxury, air-conditioned hotels in Delhi. And nothing happend, India stayed poor... during the same period China got its advice from the other direction, "advice" insofar as it wasn't their own ideas, it was basically coming from Stalin's Russia and they followed a roughly similar policy and they stayed poor.... Then about twenty or thirty years ago, for various reasons, the views in those countries shifted, and both countries moved a considerable difference but not nearly as far as I think they should have towards something more like a market society with private means of production, private buying and selling and so forth, and since then they've started getting ... well "rich" would exaggerate it but getting less poor - that instead of worrying about China as "how will they feed themselves or India, we're worried about China as a competitor to America. Isn't that terrible? We might have somebody else as rich as we are, how can we stand that? And economic development takes power. If we were somehow able, and fortunately we're not, but if we were somehow able to get the people of India and China to do what our position on global warming says they have to do, that would mean ending the most successful war on poverty since free immigration to the U.S.... because it would mean slowing or reversing economic development because it would mean one of the major inputs to doing stuff would have suddenly become much more expensive and much less available... Getting two to three billion people out of poverty is a lot more important in my view than keeping the world's temperature from going up two or three degrees centigrade."

Good stuff. It puts me in mind of a letter I wrote to the Taipei Times back in November 2009 on the subject of global warming and the Climategate scandal in which I wrote this:

"...what is at stake here, politically, is whether an increasing apparatus of state control over society, globally networked, is the right way to deal with any problematic climate change, or whether, on the other hand, a rapid dismantling of state apparatus both internationally and domestically would spur the necessary economic development to make technological solutions affordable on a global scale."

They didn't publish it.

Money: The Red & The Black

In response to this assertion by commenter GunRights4US at John Venlet's post on the ethics of money...

"The root of evil is the LOVE of money, not merely the money itself."

... I made the following comment:

"Nonsense, and one reason it is nonsense is that it does not attend to the principles on which money is acquired through action.

What must be distinguished is money acquired through freely undertaken work (a subcategory of trade) from money acquired through the application of leveraged institutional force (e.g. in taxation via say, the bond “market”, which is a subcategory of theft).

Obtaining money in the latter way is an endoresement of evil, not the root of evil itself.

Obtaining money in the former way is an accruement of the moral authority necessary to pursue other values."

The difference between money acquired through trade (honest money) and money acquired through theft (dirty money) is crucial to what the "love" of money signifies - the love of honest money is a tremendous source of goodness, in that it signifies the application of creative effort to the end of improving the material and/or spiritual means with which people conduct their lives.

The love of dirty money signifies something else entirely...

When Truth-Telling Is Futile

When I was already in Crematorium V, a train from Byalistock arrived. A prisoner on the "special detail" saw a woman in the "undressing room", who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: "you are going to be exterminated; in three hours you will be ashes." The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned the other women: "We're going to be killed. We're going to be gassed." Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn't want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men - to no avail. Not that they didn't believe her; they'd heard rumors in the Byalistock ghetto, or in Grodno and elsewhere - but who wanted to hear that!? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face - out of despair, in shock. And she started to scream. So what happened? Everyone was gassed. The woman was held back. We had to line up in front of the oven. First they tortured her horribly, because she wouldn't betray him. In the end, she pointed to him. He was taken out of the line and thrown alive into the oven. We were told: "Whoever tell [sic] anything will end like that!"

That is taken from an interview with Fillip Müller in the first three minutes of segment 37 of Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary "Shoah".

Via John Venlet.

On Monetary & Fiscal Reform

Sirs,

Whilst the daily front-page items in the Taipei Times, China Post and the Chinese language newspapers concentrate on judiciary rulings, defense issues, the proposed petrochemicals plant in Changhua and of course the ongoing political soap opera within the DPP in the run up to next year's election, there is a scarcely noticed shadow issue, which, when it is apprehended at all, appears on the latter pages of the business sections (and just once in a letter published three years ago on February 23rd 2009).

That issue is the fragility of Taiwan's current monetary system.

On April 16th this year, Amy Su reported on the claim by the Alliance for Fair Tax Reform (公平稅改聯盟) that, contrary to the Ministry Of Finance's published figure of NT$4.85 trillion, the government's total debt adds up to more than four times that at approximately NT$21 trillion - or just shy of NT$1 million per person.

If that figure is correct, then the implication that may have for long term interest rates and consequently the stability of the NT dollar ought to be apparent; the government of Taiwan is effectively bankrupt, and with similar situations existing in both the U.S. and in China (not to mention Europe) - there can be no-one to turn to for help.

Next year's administration - whichever party it is - will face a simple choice: either begin to actively deal with this problem now or keep trying to put it off until financial meltdown arrives. It is better that both political parties admit now that this problem exists and stop pretending that economic growth and public spending can be "stimulated" indefinitely.

Any strategy for dealing with this problem must include two broad aspects of reform: one is reform of the monetary system with a return to commodity-based currencies of inelastic supply; the other is a systemic policy of privatization to encompass education, healthcare and other social services which, together with administration costs, currently account for over 60% of annual expenditure (or just over NT$1 trillion per year).

Neither of these two policies would avert entirely the serious economic fall the people of Taiwan face in the future, but they may help to break that fall somewhat, making it easier for the 23 million people on this island to cope.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Saturday April 23rd 2011. Published in the Taipei Times Monday April 25th 2011.)

Addendum: I am always pleased to see my letters published, but whoever was at the desk today just had to go and dick with my numbers so that my NT$21 trillion is now misprinted as NT$15 trillion:

"...contrary to the Ministry of Finance’s published figure of NT$4.85 trillion (US$168 billion), total government debt is in fact more than four times that at approximately NT$15.7 trillion — or just under NT$1 million man, woman and child in the nation."

That's not what I wrote and the alteration is both innumerate and illiterate. Not happy about that.

The Pragmatist Of Taichung

"If annexing Taiwan to China would solve that problem [PRC expansionism - ed], then it might be a permissable solution."

That came from the keyboard of Michael Turton.

Update... last night a little bird told me, from personal communication interestingly enough, that Turton's grandfather may have either worked with, or had something to do with (drum roll)... John Dewey, the third man of American Pragmatism after William James and C.S. Pierce.

Keeping Score

Detlev Schlichter, in a piece entitled "Embrace Default" at his place:

"The productive sector in Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Greece is keeping the political sector in all these countries alive, is paying for the mistakes of the political sector and is funding its growth. Because the political sector is always growing."

Taiwan must be added to that list too as its "political sector" shows its parasitical appetite in the papers and on certain other blogs on an almost daily basis.

I will continue to make the arguments for all the various aspects of a depoliticization program, with an eye on both the collapse and the Chinese annexation of course, though I have never expected to find many "friends and allies". I am, however, keeping score - for whatever that may eventually be worth to someone.

Against C.J. Wu 吳啟禎

They do like to keep the red flag flying in the TT don't they? Not a jot of irony between the lot of them: consider this plate of barely-warmed-over Naomi Klein ejectile from one C.J. Wu (吳啟禎) of the interestingly named Taiwan "Thinktank"...

"...data released by the Ministry of Finance and other departments show that income distribution in Taiwan is becoming more and more unequal."

To speak of the "distribution" of income is as morally outrageous as to speak of the "distribution" of women - neither women nor income are to be rightfully considered as mere quantities subject to State policies of redistribution. The mere fact of income inequality is of no moral import whatever and neither is the extent of income inequality. What is all important is the moral fulcrum of action by which that income is obtained: there is coercive command at one end, and free exchange on the other - and yes, it is that simple.

"This [capital flight - ed] has led to an excessively rapid change in Taiwan’s manufacturing sector, which has damaged the employment prospects and incomes of middle-aged, older and less skilled workers, although it has brought benefits to capitalists and white-collar workers who have high-level knowledge and skills."

Oh? Well perhaps it's about time the employment prospects and incomes of middle-aged, older and less skilled academics in Universities and ironically-named "thinktanks" took a bit of damage too then isn't it? After all, why should the unfortunate workers continue to subsidize academic cretins - whom I might add, constitute the single largest item in the government's budget this year at >NT$348 billion - through the tax system?

"...when it comes to Taiwan’s long-term competitiveness, our society and economy have been systematically weakened, and so in turn has our capacity for innovation."

That is pure collectivized ethics: look - it is individual people who are "competitive" and other people's competitiveness is not the property of the Taiwan government to dispose of it as it sees fit. To speak of "our capacity for innovation" is insolent - it is not in any sense "ours", and least of all yours, Mr Wu.

"It ought to be possible to moderate the detrimental effects these external factors have on a country’s long-term social and economic development through income redistribution mechanisms, and this is an important functional role of government."

No it isn't; that is a symptom of a dysfunctional government, and with all due respect (i.e. none) to your "it ought to be possible" claptrap, the salient fact is that it is not possible for the simple reason that no government can spend money more wisely than a country's civil population can themselves.

"However, wealth redistribution mechanisms in Taiwan have been damaged by an economic mindset heavily biased toward the supply side that has long been held by successive governments."

The veracity of that claim must be considered against the fact that those "redistribution measures" now account for almost half of current government spending at NT$838 billion,* or almost three times that of defense. If the word "fact" means anything to you, then you will draw the appropriate conclusion as to Mr Wu's claim that wealth redistributions mechanisms are "damaged".

"Around the world, this kind of supply-side economic thinking has come to be widely seen by academics as “voodoo economics.”..."

I see they still stock those old left-wing comics in the mental institutions then...

"This brand of economic thought has been carefully reconsidered and strongly criticized in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis."

No - you people can't even "carefully reconsider" your own lies and outrageous expropriations of the semantic content of words.

"Now, however, it is seen as lacking a scientific basis, as well as being detrimental to economic justice and being at least one of the factors contributing to the greed that led to the financial crisis."

"Economic justice" is just a euphemism for theft - this is a perfect example of how persons like Mr Wu, who perhaps benefits from such theft personally, expropriate the semantic content of words to suit his nefarious ends. And, like Turton, Wu fails to mention the two most salient aspects of Federal involvement in the 2008 financial crisis. I've got a NT$500 bill that says none of my occasional left-wing readers can tell me precisely what those two aspects are.

"Since taking office, US President Barack Obama’s administration has taken a lead in reconsidering such policies and has implemented a range of reform measures aimed at correcting the problems brought about by the infatuation with voodoo economics demonstrated by the preceding administration of former US president George W. Bush."

Oh yes - President Obama has massively inflated the U.S. national debt to over U.S.$14 trillion and then had the temerity to talk about cutting up to 27% of that - over 12 years! - with the only real figures he could offer adding up to a paltry 6% at U.S.$854 billion (which, coincidentally, was about the size of the stimulus bill signed by President Bush).

That the TT continue to publish this sort of rampant red flag waving is .... (cue mighty effort of self-restraint)... unfortunate. I've had enough - I could refute the entire thing in detail, but I can only stomach dissection for a few minutes before I begin to feel queasy.


*Education: NT$358 billion. Social Welfare: NT$347 billion. Retirement: NT$134 billion. See MOF website for budget download (excel file): I can't quite remember where it is now, but I'll post a link when I find it again later (the MOF's wesbite is a mess).

Later: The relevant link is here actually, not at the MOF website. Hit that first download item ("Brief Presentation on Analysis of Annual Revenue and Expenditure").

Two Odds & A Possible End

Lately I've had one of my "fed up" phases and haven't written much - it happens from time to time. Yet the world doesn't stop turning just because I want to get off for a five-minute breather...

I noticed that the usual suspects will be meeting up in Taipei this weekend - on Lenin's earthday no less (that's April 23rd, 小朋友: go look it up and weigh the coincidence for yourselves) - and for which I can only imagine the looks on certain faces were I to attend. I have little doubt that my being there would not be sincerely welcomed as I have nothing constructive to say to any of those people (though I do have plenty of destructive things to say). There is a common aphorism, employed to identify and distinguish good conversational manners, that one should remain silent if one has nothing constructive to say; it is an outrageous prejudice against doubt and criticism, and a good rule for people who dislike having to defend their premises out in the open. And what sort of person dislikes having to defend himself in argument, other than the tired or lazy?

I also noticed this little thing at Turton's place:

"Even after the US financial industry wrecked the world economy..."

When the next crash comes, he will be running that same line in deliberate ignorance - once again - of the two most salient aspects of Federal involvement in the financial industry. Of course, he will not be the only one spraying that two-thousand and eleven year old effluent everywhere...

In the papers...

The big one has got to be the merging of the presidential and legislative elections next year and the apparent four month interlude between those elections and the ascent to office of the new administration. That just gives me unadulterated creeps - the pretense that it was done to save a paltry NT$500 million (for a country with a national debt of approximately NT$21 trillion) is an insult to every intelligent person on this island. I can just imagine a few of the perps on the CEC sniggering off-camera when this was announced to the press...

We're in for a bumpy ride, whether we like it or not.

Jules Peck

"It's saying that in the future, business will cease to be about producing things people might want, and be more and more about preventing people from producing things people might want."

Endivio R's parsing (comment #10) of this piece of ignorati gibberish written by one "Jules Peck"...*

“My vision is of a new form of Dynamic Equilibrium economics (DEe) which will, while being steady in scale, still be thoroughly dynamic and require business to be as enterprising, creative and innovative as ever. As growth at a macro-scale is dethroned, so too will the focus of business innovation shift to a Flourishing Enterprise model of business in which companies and markets focus on objectives based on maximising societal flourishing and units of wellbeing delivered per unit planet input.”

This is what happens when an environmentalist tries to do economics - either his gibberish was written in foolish sincerity, or it was deliberately written in order to ensnare earnest, gullible fools; "units of wellbeing" must be the latest in-word on the diseased wing of the Left for the bunk labour theory of value which Marx took from Ricardo.

*Peck is apparently “Chairman of Edelman’s Sustainability and Citizenship Group, a founding Partner of the innovation and strategy consultancy Abundancy Partners, a Trustee of the new economics foundation and a Fellow of ResPublica...”, or as he may alternatively be known: "clueless tosspot".

Depoltherapy Contra Ecoentropy

Also in the Taipei Times today was another letter from David Reid arguing for a green party candidate to contest the Presidential election next year in order to raise the profile of environmental issues. He writes:

"Climate change, energy policy, water resources and industrial pollution are key issues that affect the livelihood of everyone in Taiwan. These issues are complex and interrelated. They demand a bold plan rather than a piecemeal approach of opposing or stopping certain projects."

And I agree - but unlike David whose wished for "bold plan" would have to be openly totalitarian (since it would require the State to involve itself in "complex and interrelated" issues, such as how to force people to live the way David would like them to), the "bold plan" I would like to see is one of aggressive depoltherapy against both the largest source and aggravator of environmental and other externalities: the State.

Later... my comment at David Reid's blog, which has been rejected (meaning I'm banned at several places now):

"...other people's lives are not the State's to socially engineer as you see fit David and Jenna. It is not simply your overriding concern for the environment which necessarily makes you enemies of freedom, but your embrace of the the principle of violent State coercion as the essential means of resolving environmental issues to your satisfaction."

Taiwan's Debt

Meanwhile, the debt incurred by Taiwan's government is over NT$21 trillion, according to the Alliance for Fair Tax Reform (公平稅改聯盟) as may be inferred from this report by Amy Su in the Taipei Times today. The Ministry Of Finance's calculation made available to the public puts that figure at NT$4.85 trillion - however, the Alliance argues that the ministry's figure should include something called "potential debt" (which I guess means unfunded spending commitments) as well as "non-enterprise funds" which Amy Su describes as

"...used by the government to support infrastructure projects and social welfare programs."

Apparently, those two sources of debt add up to NT$15.71 trillion and NT$579.5 billion respectively, which, together with the NT$4.85 trillion, adds up to over NT$21 trillion or NT$919,000 (US$31,365) per person. That is enormous. To get a sense of perspective, let's look at the budget figures for 2011 (available as an excel download from the Central Directorate's website), total annual expenditure is given as almost NT$1.79 trillion with a budget deficit of NT$159 billion. The four largest items in that expenditure are given as "Education, Science & Culture" at just over NT$357 billion; Social Welfare at almost NT$347 billion; National Defense at just over NT$287 billion; and "Expenditures for Economic Development" at almost NT$226 billion. Even were the government to completely eliminate spending on each of those items (NT$1,217 trillion) it would take just over 17 years to pay off the national debt. In a far less ambitious alternative, the government would need to run a budget surplus of NT$159 billion every year for 132 years in order to pay off the national debt, which is insane. In researching her report, Amy Su called a certain prof, Thomas Lee (李桐豪), at National Chengchi University to whom the obvious conclusion appears to be:

"The ministry should come up with more measures to collect money for the country...”

I doubt that such measures as a tax on overseas Taiwanese could ever bring in more than a few tens of billion a year - therefore, if the people of Taiwan are to significantly reduce their exposure to financial risk and the implications of that for the overall economy over the long term, then the inescapable conclusion is that the government in Taipei must begin cutting "public spending" seriously, aiming for substantial surpluses in the hundreds of billions of NT$ every year for the next half century or so.

President Obama's U.S.$4 Trillion Deficit Reduction

"This is my approach to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next twelve years. It’s an approach that achieves about $2 trillion in spending cuts across the budget. It will lower our interest payments on the debt by $1 trillion. It calls for tax reform to cut about $1 trillion in spending from the tax code."

Do those numbers add up, even by the President's own words? Let's see...

"The first step in our approach is to keep annual domestic spending low by building on the savings that both parties agreed to last week – a step that will save us about $750 billion over twelve years."

The agreement he refers to was reported as amounting to U.S.$37.8 billion in spending cuts for the remainder of 2011. That U.S.$37.8 billion figure over twelve years will only get him to U.S.$454 billion. So how much would those spending cuts have amounted to were they to have been agreed last year and began from January 1st 2011? In order to reach U.S.$750 billion over twelve years, they'll have to be at least 65% larger than that at U.S.$62.5 billion per year. What next...?

"The second step in our approach is to find additional savings in our defense budget... Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again. We need to not only eliminate waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness, but conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions, capabilities, and our role in a changing world. I intend to work with Secretary Gates and the Joint Chiefs on this review, and I will make specific decisions about spending after it’s complete."

U.S.$400 billion in "current and future spending" will get him nowhere - he'll be looking for other cuts on top of this.

"The third step in our approach is to further reduce health care spending in our budget. Here, the difference with the House Republican plan could not be clearer: their plan lowers the government’s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead. Our approach lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself."

I cut this section short because, despite being the longest of his four steps, it contains no specific figures. So I cannot give him anything more than a zero for this - but he'll need somewhere in the order of U.S.$2 trillion.

"The fourth step in our approach is to reduce spending in the tax code. In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again."

"Spending in the tax code"? To equate a tax cut with spending presupposes that that money belongs to the State in the first place, which means that the value of other people's labour and property belongs to the State - which is undiluted collectivism, to which I say this:

Other people's values are not the property of the State to dispose of as it sees fit, Mr President.

That aside, he is talking about raising taxes on the "wealthy" (loosely defined here as "millionaires and billionaires", although I suspect it will be defined so as to encompass a lot of small business owners) to the value of U.S.$1 trillion. That's not a spending cut; that's just taking more of other people's money to pay for things.

So on a strict reading of the President's own speech, he can see his way to cuts of U.S.$854 billion in spending, plus a U.S.$1 trillion tax rake, for a government that is more than U.S.$14 trillion in debt. Yet that only accounts for less than half of the U.S.$4 trillion he claims to be committed to "cutting". If the President is to reach his U.S.$4 trillion reduction target, then a further, unspecified U.S.$2 trillion will have to come from either further tax rakes and/or cuts to the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs.

As it stands, the President's spending "cuts" amount to only U.S. $1.854 trillion, which is at most 13% of the total >U.S.$14 trillion debt, or if we discount his tax rake (because it's not actually a spending cut), then it's only 6% of the total. Even with the further U.S.$2 trillion in cuts that will have to come from the Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs, that would get him to U.S.$3.854 trillion, or only 27% of the total debt - which isn't much (!), but it would be a baby step in the right direction.

"This larger debate we’re having, about the size and role of government, has been with us since our founding days... As a country that prizes both our individual freedom and our obligations to one another, this is one of the most important debates we can have."

Social obligations are a secondary aspect of those political rights which frame individual freedom - they are defined, contracted and implemented voluntarily. The use of government to define, impose and coercively exact the implementation of social obligations is a monstrous distortion of how things should be in a civil society.

"Some will argue we shouldn’t even consider raising taxes, even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It’s just an article of faith for them."

No it isn't, it's a point of principle: it is wrong to coercively extract value from other people, even if they are hoary old gits like Warren Buffet and George Soros.

Update: Paul Marks goes so far as to accuse the FT of openly lying in its' April 14th reporting (presumably this one by Gillian Tett [article behind paywall - use google cache]) of President Obama's "plan" as a

"...fiscal reform deal, together with $4,000bn cuts."

Paul has a case - to talk of "$4,000 bn" ($4 trillion) of cuts is a gross inaccuracy - and for a financial broadsheet committed to the virtues of honest journalism to make that kind of error is hard to believe.

Iodine 131 Half-Life: Eight Days

"To make room for more highly radioactive liquid, the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric, pumped tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific, but stopped after the move was criticized by South Korea..."

"... Japan’s nuclear safety commission has estimated that the Fukushima plant’s reactors had released up to 10,000 terabecquerels of radioactive iodine-131 per hour into the air for several hours after they were damaged in the March 11 earthquake and tsunami."

What Mark Tran neglects to mention in that piece is that iodine 131 isotopes have a half-life of eight days during which time the isotope decays. That decay time limits the extent of the immediate ecological damage the isoptope can inflict, though an accurate assessment of the secondary ecological consequences of this damage will require empirical field work. Information about radioisotope half-lives is critically important to understanding what threat that 10,000 terabecquerel figure poses to the people and ecology in the immediate vicinity of the Daiichi plant. That is my chief criticism of this otherwise reasonably balanced piece.

Human Monsters

"There's no evidence that Godboldo disputed the seriousness of her daughter's condition; as Ariana's primary caretaker, she understood it very well. She had very reasonable doubts about the competence of the therapeutic officials who were forcing Ariana to undergo injections of a potentially lethal drug. But it is impermissible for parents to entertain such reservations about the wisdom of those clothed in the purported authority of the State, or to resist their prescriptions, whatever their efficacy."

William Grigg, at Pro Libertate, reports on the latest incidence of CPS monsters kidnapping a child in Michigan, after having illegally broken into her mother's home at gunpoint. Toward the end of that same piece, Grigg writes brilliantly:

"The federally subsidized child "protection" universe is a joint production of Lenin, Kafka and Salvador Dali in which power means everything, facts and law mean nothing, and the contours of "reality" are warped in the service of self-enraptured bureaucrats."

That's why I take fools like Yang Ji-charng and "Torch Pratt" seriously: the comfortable ignorance with which they commit themselves to infernal paper-scratching about "decisions" and "belonging" is a clear danger to those, like me, who would be left alone to run their own lives.

Via Billy Beck.

Against Yang Ji-charng

"A disaster on the scale of that at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant would cripple Taiwan, a price the 23 million people of Taiwan cannot afford."

My response to that outrageous trouser-flash...

First, decisions as to what any given individual can "afford" are invariably decisions made in a context of action in which alternatives may be chosen (e.g. the risks of nuclear power vs the gross inefficiencies of renewables); by what curious labyrinthine twists of reason did Yang Ji-charng arrive at the view, implicitly stated here, that he is competent to dictate the decisions of 23 million other people (including me)? Such monstrous arrogance would properly be considered breathtaking by any decent person were it not so commonplace.

Second, the fact-free fear-bites Yang flings around about such a disaster "crippling" Taiwan are bunk for two principle reasons:

(1) Nuclear power contributes 18% of electricity to Taiwan's power grid - the sudden removal of this would create great difficulties, but the entire economy would not be "crippled"; 82% of the grid's capacity would still be available.

(2) The time-scale at which a radiation leakage would occur would likely be slow enough (days, weeks or even months) to allow ample time for precautionary measures to be taken. So far as I am aware, this is not true of any other source of industrial-scale electricity generation (readers: please correct me if this is wrong).

"Taiwan’s best bet is to decommission its nuclear plants and use alternative energy sources..."

Taiwan is not a hive and as such "it" does not make decisions - people make their own individual decisions in a multiplicity of social and politico-economic contexts. Some individuals may prefer to purchase electricity from windfarms - fine, let them pay for it. Some individuals may prefer to purchase electricity from gas-fired plants - let them make that choice and pay for it.

In short, put an end to State monopoly over energy, and allow people to make their own investment and purchase decisions on electricity. The other 23 million people in Taiwan do not belong to you Yang Ji-charng, nor do they belong to those State agencies which mendaciously claim to protect them and act in their best interests. They belong entirely to themselves and it is outrageous for you to presume otherwise.

FAO "Torch Pratt"

"I don’t support the death penalty, but I observe that the EPA’s policies are in effect driving their own children to an early death."

Children do not belong to the EPA, and neither do your petty-fascist impulses.

In Defence Of Nuclear Power

Sirs,

An honest critic attending to the risks to human safety posed by industrial-scale electricity production in Taiwan would have reason to be concerned about the possible election of a DPP administration next year. Its' two possible presidential candidates have both stated their intention to abolish the safest form of industrial-scale electricity production: nuclear power. According to WHO statistics, not only have fewer deaths occured per TW hour of electricity from nuclear power than from any other source (0.04), but were a critical situation to develop at a nuclear power plant - even one as poorly managed as Taipower's three plants - the time scale would be so slow as to ensure few, if any human deaths or injuries (except perhaps from those resulting from irrational public panic). An honest reader must also consider how many lives have been saved, and continue to be saved, in hospitals around the world for the past fifty years due to the availability of nuclear technology and the cheap electricity supplied by nuclear power.

Likewise, a scrupulous observer careful only to the environmental aspects of industrial-scale electricity production in Taiwan would regard with trepidation the possible election of a DPP administration next year. The reason for that is - again - the DPP's stated intention to abolish nuclear power, the one form of industrial-scale electricity production with arguably the lowest environmental impact of all; it requires the least amount of land per electricity output; it requires comparatively low quantities of metals and concrete for construction; and its' waste products naturally decay over time and can be disposed of with little or no threat to the wider ecology (despite the scare-mongering over the low-level waste disposal site in Lanyu).

By contrast however, a dishonest politicist, sensitive only to the crass sentiments of Sunday-cycling posers and the smell of government-largesse scented subsidies, would relish the prospect of an elected DPP administration next year. The reason for this is that renewable sources of electricity generation - wind, solar, hydro and biofuels - are so costly in both capital outlay and land, so meagre, inefficient and unpredictable at generating electricity, so expensive and challenging to properly maintain and manage, and so environmentally damaging in respect of the chemical requirements for their manufacture ... that their construction will necessitate either reduced standards of living for the vast majority of Taiwan's working poor via increased electricity prices, or the construction of yet more fossil-fed, thermal power stations - in which more working people may die in accidents.

It is to their great discredit that such people clamour uncontrollably for the political destruction of nuclear power in Taiwan.

(Sent: Wednesday April 13th 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times.)

Stand Unafraid

"For anyone about to allow Turton's scaremongering to frighten them into submission: .... kiss your brain goodbye - if you ever had one."

My comment, which will more than likely go unpublished now that my ban is presumably reinstated, at Turton's place: people like him and the despicable Winston Dang are not intellectuals but intellectual bullies - and poor ones at that. The real threat is not posed by the nuclear power station in Kenting, it is posed by the hysterical reaction which would likely follow any perceived "crisis" and the resulting confusion, error and accidents as everybody scrambles madly like headless chickens to evacuate at the same time. A nuclear crisis has a slow time scale and you would likely be exposed to only a trace increase in background radiation.

Against Winston Dang (陳重信) 2

The remainder of Winston Dang's editorial in this morning's Taipei Times is also largely bunk...

"Many small advanced nations, such as Denmark and Luxembourg, have used renewable energy sources to replace nuclear energy."

Comparisons of Taiwan to countries like Denmark, Luxembourg (!) (or even Norway) are bunk for two reasons: the first is that their electricity demand is only a fraction of Taiwan's; the second is that their geography is significantly different, thus large-scale hydro-electricity projects which may be possible in Norway are that much more difficult to instantiate in Taiwan.

"Denmark has 25 million pigs and uses electricity from recycled waste water from pig farming and compost to solve the problem of waste-water pollution. Taiwan only has 6 million to 7 million pigs, so there is no reason why we cannot do the same. Liukuaicuo (六塊厝) in Pingtung County has initiated an experimental plan to generate electricity from biogas produced from pig excrement as well as a project to generate hydroelectricity."

Whatever is being done in Liukuaicuo (六塊厝) doesn't change the facts, and the two salient facts here are first, that the amount of energy that can be generated from the effluent of Taiwan's 7 million pigs is insignificant on a national scale (just over 1,000 MW hours per year, or less than 0.2% of Dang's renewables target of 58 TW hours per year); second, as a commenter on this blog noted four days ago, the distribution of pigs in Taiwan is such that it would be uneconomic anyway to attempt to produce electricity from biogas produced from pig effluent.

"Denmark raised the price of gasoline, levied taxes on carbon dioxide emission and took energy-saving policies to the household level. The result was that energy consumption remained unchanged and unemployment fell below 2 percent. By 2007, 16 to 18 percent of Denmark’s energy came from solar power and wind energy."

What a foolish illustration: so the government of Denmark instituted policies to raise the cost of living and this is to be taken as a model for Taiwan to imitate? Winston - have you not seen the queues at gas stations the night before the petrol prices are due to go up? Were the cost of electricity to rise suddenly for the many small manufacturers here in Taiwan, the effect might well be enough to put some of them - already operating on tight profit margins at best - out of business; and then you must consider the effect this might have upon those businesses (including other manufacturers) who rely on those smaller manufacturers for supplies. Such policies in Taiwan would likely raise unemployment as well as reduce material standards of living for the vast majority of Taiwan's working poor.

And actually, nearly all of that 16% - 18% of Denmark's electricity came from wind, not solar.

"An eco-friendly science park in Liuying Township (柳營), Greater Tainan, is in the initial stages of planning the use of a solar power generator with a Dual-Axis Tracker System to show how this method can increase power generation efficiency by 11 percent."

沒關係! They could improve the efficiency of those solar cells by 100% and they'd still be insignificant on a national scale.

"In another eco-friendly science park in Greater Kaohsiung’s Gangshan Township (岡山), private companies are replacing natural gas and gasoline for cars with hydrogen from pure water."

Then I bet they aren't "private" companies - for to do that you have to find a way to store hydrogen, which is expensive (que: subsidies, que: government control).

"The question of whether the right environment exists for developing green energy is a matter of political determination and has nothing to do with whether the natural environment will permit it."

Agreed, but that isn't the argument. The argument comprises three questions:

• (a) How much it will cost - financially, politically and economically - to develop green energy?
• (b) On whom would those costs disproportionately fall?
• (c) Would those costs be voluntarily undertaken or coercively imposed?

That third question is the big one. Of course, judging by the tenor and tone of Dang's editorial, I already have what I think would have to be his answers for all three of those questions.

2nd Letter Against Winston Dang (陳重信)

Sirs,

In Tuesday's edition (12th April) Winston Dang (陳重信) made the following statement in paragraph eight of his editorial piece:

"If 20,000 hectares were used to generate electricity instead of planting trees, electricity equivalent to the amount produced by five Fourth Nuclear Power Plants could be produced. So how can one say that Taiwan does not have the necessary environment needed to develop green energy?"

If, by "green energy" readers are to understand that Dang is referring to an onshore wind farm (and it must be, since solar photvoltaic must be dismissed on this scale), then this remark is inexplicable. The amount of energy which the fourth nuclear power plant at Longmen is designed to generate is approximately 19 TW hours per year. Five times that value would be 95 TW hours per year. With an area of 200 square kilometres, 1,800 of the very largest onshore wind turbines in production today could be built. Under the generous assumption that these turbines would operate at an average 30% efficiency, a farm comprising 1,800 of them could generate a maximum of just over 33 TW hours of energy per year. That's not even twice the magnitude of the energy which the fourth nuclear plant would generate.

Dang's statement is either evidence of his own innumeracy or a deliberate attempt to mislead. Whichever it is, perhaps it is not too far beneath a former high-ranking public servant such as Dang to publicly apologize for his grossly misleading statement in your pages at the earliest opportunity.

Yours freely
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Tuesday April 12th 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times.)

"Everything Competes With Everything"

Brian Micklethwait is reminded by Rob Fisher of a brilliant little economic aphorism he once wrote:

"Everything Competes With Everything"

Where some people tend to focus upon competition within a delineated area of production (e.g. electricity generation) and consequently worry about the threat of monopolies, what may often elude their focus is the fact of competition between different areas of production (e.g. electricity versus coffee).

The implications of this observation are profound. As just one simple example of this, consider that, were the price of domestic electricity to rise significantly later this year or next, my probable response would be to spend more time in the park with my dog drinking coffee than I currently do in my apartment. In doing so, I would be spending less on electricity and more on coffee. That shift in spending less money on one type of product (electricity) to spending more money on a second type of product (coffee) will be facilitated by a third product - my prospective purchase of the iPad 2. Assuming its' battery life is as good as claimed, I'll be able to charge it at home (or elsewhere) for less electricity than I would use were I spending more time at home (where I use an old laptop), and yet I'd be able to get approximately the same amount of web-time. *

In a non-rigged market therefore, gigantic windfarms would not only have to compete with other sources of electricity generation like gas-fired power plants, but they'd also have to compete with completely different sorts of things - like coffee (and who knows what else...). This insight is an acute recognition of the essential unpredictability of human economic activity over time and thus the hubris of "rational" State involvement in the economy.

*See comment.

Cheers Dellers!

"They lost. We won. Basically the UEA [University of East Anglia] were trying to use the PCC [Press Complaints Commission] as a way of gagging this blog from speaking unpalatable truths about the shoddy goings-on in its notorious Climatic Research Unit.... To its enormous credit the PCC stuck up for fair comment and freedom of speech. This is a massive victory not just for me and Telegraph blogs, but for bloggers everywhere – especially those doughty souls around the world who are battling against Establishment lies, bullying and cover ups to try to reveal the truth about the corrupt, mendacious Climate Change industry."

That's James Dellingpole noting the "sweet smell of napalm in the morning"! That Phil Jones and co tried to have Dellingpole gagged speaks volumes for what kind of people they are. I'll have a little celebratory drink to their defeat and Dellers' victory tonight...

{Later...}

...Oh, and coincidentally, the issue over which the Press Complaints Commission ruled here is the same issue for which Turton banned me last year, namely the judgement that the CRU's work was - in the words of Dellingpole - a "shoddy disgrace". It was, and I was right, and so was Dellingpole.

Depoliticize Taiwan

From a seemingly naive editorial in Sunday's Taipei Times by one Chang Kuang-chiu (張光球):

"How could she [Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文)] not be aware of the realities of Taiwan’s dependence on nuclear power?"

She will be aware of the reality - that dependence can be changed, but only at enormous cost. I'm taking her at her word.

"An individual gives their sacred vote to a politician because of specific promises and has no recourse if that politician later reneges. The only avenue open to them is to not vote for that politician again."

That's one reason why the range and scale of promises available for politicians to make should be aggressively cut in an effort to depoliticize Taiwan. To cast a vote on how the State should use the value of other people's labour taken by force is not "sacred", it is insolent, and an affront to one's fellow human beings.

Response To Turton & Co...

This will be my last comment on that thread at Turton's place, as the three of them (Turton, "M" and Robert Scott Kelly) do not seem to be seriously interested in considering the costs of increasing the proportion of Taiwan's total electricity generation from renewable sources to 25%. I wish I hadn't brought up that report on Scotland, as it just gave Turton a technicality with which he could deliberately evade the logic of my argument, which is valid. Another self-criticism would be that I haven't made enough of the load management problems associated with wind power and other renewable sources (although those problems can be solved). Turton's remarks in italics, mine in regular type-face.

* * *

"It clearly states that the upward pressure on prices is not seriously affecting the wind industry."

The wind industry in Scotland was built up incrementally - the price changes do not affect those wind turbines already built, but those which are planned for the future. Different assumptions must be made in Taiwan because Tsai has openly talked about replacing nuclear power (18% of total electricity production), and the environmentalists have gone even further and suggested 25% (and no doubt some will be pushing for a figure of 28%-30% in order to replace coal). Whereas in Scotland landowners were not in a position to know the scale of the demand for wind turbines before setting their prices, this is far more likely to be the case in Taiwan because of Tsai's announcement - one which makes her seem moderate in comparison to some of her supporters. The farmers association will already be thinking about this because they are going to make a killing if they play their cards right.

"Robert has already pointed out that fallow land is in huge supply in Taiwan, never mind that the amount of land which your simplistic calculations identify is only a tiny plot compared to the 32000 square kms Taiwan has."

My calculations are simple because the problem is simple. What simple Robert failed to grasp was that acquiring many plots of land on that sort of scale has significant cost implications. Only 2000 square kilometres might actually be available and all of it controlled by farmers - who are politically organized enough to dictate the financial terms of any lease arrangements, assuming the State does not coerce them. Since the farmers control the limited supply of land, and they are looking at essentially one buyer (Taipower, via a Tsai government) there are only two reasons why they would not take advantage of this: one is that the government may threaten to cut their subsidies and other benefits, whilst the other is that the government may threaten them with force. That doesn't mean the windfarms could never get built - but it does mean they would likely cost far more than they would if the State was not involved in either agriculture or energy. Wind power is great, but trying to do it on the sort of scale being talked about would be a serious blunder.

"Believe it or not, not only can existing technology fulfill Tsai's demands but future wind technologies will perform even better -- Norway has just deployed the first 10 MW floating wind machine which can be placed in really deep water where constant and powerful winds blow."

Those existing technologies are called combined-cyle gas turbines.

I am aware of the 10 MW turbines in Norway: the prototype cost almost NT$2 billion. Let's assume the production version would cost 10% of that at NT$200 million. Let's further assume that, because of technological improvements and a suitable wind environment (an assumption which might not be transferable to Taiwan - I don't know), such a 10 MW turbine will operate at 50% efficiency across a year. In order to replace nuclear power in Taiwan in electricity volume alone (leaving aside the cost implications of load management), a minimum of 820 of those turbines would have to be built. If we were to be more cautious and assume an average efficiency of 25%, then 1,640 of them would have to be built. In capital costs alone therefore, at NT$200 million per turbine, we're talking between NT$164 billion and NT$328 billion. And then there will be the maintenance, power transmission and grid connection costs - costs which are significantly lower for either a nuclear or a gas-fired power plant.

"You tend to think of wind as a "mature" technology without really thinking that wind is a package of technological systems, many of which are still in their infancy (like deployment and siting techs) while others are moribund and likely to see revolutionary development when the switch to renewables occurs (like transmission tech and transmission system organization technologies)."

That may well be so (although those improvements will most likely be marginal) - but the context for this debate is the 14 year time frame in which a Tsai administration would like to phase out nuclear power in Taiwan and replace it - or perhaps even exceed it - with renewables like wind. Even if those revolutionary changes do occur in the next 14 years, they will have to occur before any investment decisions are made.

"...overcoming Taipower's aversion to it, as well as reforming Taiwan's hidebound regulations."

Get the State out of both agriculture and energy.

* * *

I corrected some minor typos.

"Alternatives To The Alternatives"

A very strange import-editorial was published in the Taipei Times today from one H.T. Goranson - a writer and former U.S. government scientist in Soros' stable at PS. The article is very strange for several reasons: first, it breaks the Left's "party-line" (to the extent there is one) by admitting that renewable energy sources are basically useless on an industrial scale; second, there are some strange remarks touching on astrophysics which even a simple layman like me can recognize as ... a bit weird; third, the author gropes around for some sort of "game-changer" which, like the Manhatten Project, would really be an engineering problem rather than a scientific problem - yet he fails to mention Bussard's polywell fusion, which, to my knowledge, is exactly that.

2011 U.S. Budget "Impasse"

"The clock was ticking yesterday for Republicans and Democrats to come up with a deal to avert a US federal government shutdown at midnight yesterday after US President Barack Obama failed to resolve the impasse."

Errant gibberish: how could the President "fail" to resolve it? It's very simple: cut some of the goddamn spending commitments - the Republicans will agree to it, after all its not like they're free-market people.

The President is not interested in rational criticism of his spending commitments, or even just what would be a slack-alice pragmatic compromise so... on the normative premises of mainstream U.S. politics, it simply doesn't make sense for President Obama to insist that the Federal Government must spend almost U.S.$4 trillion in one financial year.

Victor Davis Hanson, I think, might well agree with that assessment, but is reluctant to state as much explicitly:

"On the budget, Obama has run up in under three years almost $5 trillion in new debt — a figure that even he acknowledges is unsustainable. That’s why he trumpeted a new bipartisan debt commission, whose findings were as sensible as they were ignored."

It actually makes a lot more sense if you entertain the proposition that all of this is being done on purpose.

Bader On TRA

"A leading US foreign policy expert is charging that the administration of US President Barack Obama has “shown little to no knowledge or real interest” in the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). William Bader, a former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, makes his case in a letter given prominent display in Thursday’s edition of the Financial Times."

No shit. I've been saying that since the beginning, and most recently here, but the stupid commies over here quite naturally don't want to know (because obviously, Obama is "awesome"). William Lowther continues his report on Bader's remarks...

"He says that first the administration of former US president George W. Bush and now the Obama administration have neglected the TRA and the legislative binding of its articles which were “most reluctantly signed” by then-US President Jimmy Carter on April 10, 1979."

You know what Jimmy Carter is to me? A euphemism.

Response To"M" & Robert Scott Kelly

Part of my as yet unpublished comment at Turton's place:

* * *

M: .... Yes countries like Denmark for instance whose total electricity production is only a fraction of Taiwan's: >40 TW hours per year as against 230 TW hours per year. So 25% in Denmark is <5% in Taiwan, and guess what Taiwan's renewable percentage already is?

RSK: .... I did not say the area is "impossible" to find. The issue is not whether 25% from renewables can be technically accomplished - of course it can be - the issue is the costs (political-economic; not merely financial) of doing so on such a scale. Believe it or not, I like wind turbines, but demand for a wind farm on that scale means Taipower (and by extension, us the taxpayers) are going to get royally screwed in lease rates, unless the government turns fascist on the farmers associations.

* * *

Meanwhile Lewis Page at the Register reports on how windfarms in the UK have gotten swallowed up in a rent-seeking trap... so it seems I may need to revise my enthusiasm for the aesthetically sublime Enercon E-126:

"...wind-farm operators make most of their money not from selling electricity but from selling the renewables obligation certificates (ROCs) which they obtain for putting power onto the grid... Thus when wind farmers have a lot of power they will actually pay to get it onto the grid if necessary in order to obtain the lucrative ROCs which provide most of their revenue, forcing all non-renewable providers out of the market."

Given Turton's unwillingness to defend his position with actual arguments rather than childish smears (e.g."Randplanet"), I suspect my recent "unbanning" will be temporary...

Beth Haynes Against The ACA

Since its inception, Beth has been arguing cogently against the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act passed by the previous U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Obama. She does so again superbly in this one minute video. If you are interested in the question of how healthcare ought to be structured and funded, please consider her archive of posts on the PPACA here, and her archive on matters relating to healthcare more generally here.

On The Size Of M's "IF"

"If Taiwan can get to 25% renewables..."

At best, that "IF" would be 138m high, and cover an area of 398km2 - about 45% bigger than Taipei City. (Onshore windfarms consisting of 2,478 Enercon E-126 turbines)

Alternatively, that "IF" would be large enough to encircle the coast of the entire island several times over. (Offshore windfarms, extrapolating from the "London Array" and the length of Taiwan).

In still another permutation, a mere 6.5% (let's be generous, assume significant technological improvement and call it 10%) of that "IF" would cover every inch of every rooftop of every kind of building in all of Taiwan's cities, major and minor. (Solar photovoltaic, based on the Lhuju plant in Kaohsiung County).

So, IF, you environmentalists can find a cure for your rectocranialitis, then perhaps you could start talking about a much smaller and practically affordable IF.

FAO "Pommie"

"... we must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."

That's Lionel Trilling, as quoted in an essay by Michael Knox Beran in City Journal. I quote this in reference to Pommie's insistence that Bruno Walther is "a good man, truth be told", and also as a self-cautionary reflection on my own tendency toward ideological categorization of other people's views. I found the essay fascinating, and the blurb for Beran's book sounds interesting too:

"...Mr. Beran exposes the romance of dominion that underlies the philosophy of social benevolence..."

Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) On Petrochemicals Industry

"Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential hopeful Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday defended her plans to move the nation’s petrochemicals industry to the Middle East, calling the effort environmentally friendly, viable and urgently needed."

I hadn't known she wanted to do that - uproot an entire industry and force it to relocate to Saudi Arabia? I'm stunned. Tsai cannot possibly know the extent of economic havoc that would wreak, not only upon the industry itself and the people who work in it, but also the havoc such a move would wreak upon many other downstream industries, including the electronics sector.

"In a rare point of disagreement, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), seen as a staunch supporter of Tsai, said on Sunday that Tsai “did not understand the petrochemicals industry”.."

I agree with the old man - except I'd go further and question whether she in fact understands the importance of marginal price differences in industrial production: if it was economically viable and attractive for CPC and Formosa to shift production to the Middle East, they'd surely be in the process of doing that already.

Related semi-thoughts: I know that CPC have spent the last twenty years or so trying to import more oil and gas from the likes of Kazakhstan and to rely less on the Saudis (always a good thing), so forcing them to relocate to the Middle East would surely undo all of that work. Another thing: natural gas imports to be used in gas-fired power stations would still need to be handled by CPC and Formosa, so she surely cannot be serious about relocating the entire industry - otherwise we really would be in serious trouble with her plan to phase out nuclear power in the next fourteen years.

I've googled around for an hour or so but I still can't find any proper publicly available data - links anyone?

Belated second thought: it's a bluff to get the petrochemicals industry onside in her nomination campaign and the old codger is probably in on it.

Counting X-Rays

My comment on J.Michael Cole's otherwise commendable article criticizing Taipower's typically Taiwanese, 差不多 attidude toward maintenance and cleaning of its' nuclear power plants:

* * *

Good work - I entirely agree that Taipower ought to be exposed to this sort of criticism, and it is the proper function of journalists to do exactly this sort of work.

Yet I think there may be a numerical error in your report:

"Contact dose rates on the suppression chamber liner at the conclusion of the cleaning work showed a significant decrease in radiation levels, from 10 millisieverts per hour to more than 80 millisieverts per hour (or the equivalent of 800 chest X-rays) before work to 0.15 millisieverts per hour to 2 millisieverts per hour after its conclusion."

I fact-checked this using wikipedia (in this case there is little reason to doubt the veracity of the article) and actually, a typical chest X-ray does not involve an exposure to 0.1 mSv, but to only 0.06 mSv. A value of 80 mSv therefore would be equivalent to 1,333 chest X rays, not 800 chest X rays. Bad though that level is, it ought to be borne in mind that symptoms of light radiation sickness don't generally occur at doses below 1000 mSv per hour, or 16,662 chest X-rays.

Yes let's have Taipower brought to heel by all means, but let's not add any fuel to the fire of public panic and ignorance over the dangers of radiation. There's more than enough of that already.

* * *

Update: The Blogger Glitch ate my comment a couple of times. Anyway, a bit more scooting around reveals that J.M's value of 0.1 mSv per chest X-ray is an average value (students doing the X-rays and mucking them up half the time - hence a range), though properly done, the exposure should be less and I suspect the wikipedia figure of 0.06 mSv is probably the one that the professionals would stipulate to. Anybody know?

Letter Against Winston Dang (陳重信)

Sirs,

In Monday's editorial, former EPA minister Winston Dang (陳重信) claimed that if only renewable energy output in Taiwan could be raised to 25% of total electricity production then there would be no reason why a future Tsai administration could not achieve a phase-out of nuclear energy. To put actual values on those bones, that means raising the output of renewables from 9 TW hours to 58 TW hours from the annual total for electricity production of 229.7 TW hours. Let us consider how that scale of output could be achieved by means of four sources of energy: combined-cycle gas turbines, onshore windfarms, offshore windfarms and solar photovoltaic.

From a set of top class combined-cycle, multi-shaft gas turbines, that 58 TW hours target could be achieved by 14 such gas-fired power plants (848 MW each operating at 58% efficiency) for a capital cost very similar to the Longmen nuclear plant at NT$280 billion and requiring approximately 7 square kilometres.

In reference to an onshore windfarm facility, and extrapolating from data pertaining to the Enercon E-126 turbine with a power rating of 7 MW, Dang's target of 58 TW hours annually would require 2,478 such mega-turbines, operating at 30% efficiency on 398 square kilometres of land at a capital cost just shy of NT$57 billion. Whilst the capital cost is much cheaper than the gas option, such a windfarm would require 40% more land than Taipei City.

To extrapolate from the published figures for the UK's largest offshore windfarm, the London Array (NT$91 billion; 1,000 MW power rating; 195 square kilometres), such a windfarm in Taiwan, assuming it would operate at 30% efficiency, could generate 58 TW hours annually only if its power rating was increased to 19,400 MW - which would mean so many turbines as to consume 3770 square kilometres at a capital cost of NT$1.8 trillion dollars. That's the size of 14 Taipei Cities - at sea!

Taking our bearings from the Lhuju solar plant, 58 TW hours a year could be generated by so many such plants that they would have a combined power rating of 6,600 MW, cover an area of 7,250 square kilometres (or 26.5 Taipei Cities!) and would have to be built at a capital cost of almost NT$9 trillion dollars! Even if a Tsai administration decided to make solar cell purchases compulsory for every rooftop of every kind of building in all of Taiwan's major (and minor) cities, that would only take up, at most (i.e. the real figure is probably a third of this) 3,422 square kilometres, and thus only 27.3 TW hours a year.

In his editorial Dang even went so far as to claim that not only would 25% of total electricity production be an appropriate target for renewable investment to aim for, but that Taiwanese people should even be aiming for 100% by 2050. Sirs... with numbers this bad who could possibly trust Dang even with the till at a local 7-11?

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Tuesday April 5th 2011. Published in the Taipei Times Wednesday April 6th 2011.)

NB: I'm very pleased this was published, and I have no complaints with the edits this time. However, I think it's quite poorly written - my original draft of this letter was more fluent but was well over the word limit).

Against Michael Moore

Via the ever brilliant Iowakhawk with Bill Whittle:

"Data ... is usually fatal to the [Left's] world view..."

Against Winston Dang (陳重信)

Two pieces in the Timid Times' editorial section today: the first was this attempt at intellectual and moral intimidation by one Winston Dang, a former EPA minister; the second was this piece of subterfuge by John Vidal, chief eco-fascist at the Guardian.*

Winston Dang's piece begins with this:

"For those politicians who think nuclear reactors are so safe that we can cuddle them while we sleep, Tsai’s no-nukes policy is just as scary as any earthquake or nuclear emergency."

It is clear from that sentence alone that Dang has no respect whatsoever for factual analysis of risk or for the people who designed nuclear power stations with extremely high safety standards in mind. Consider this fact-free bit of soundbite scaremongering:

"Following the events in Fukushima, no one in the world dares call himself an expert on nuclear safety, because the old methods of risk assessment and the old ways of considering environmental factors all have to change."

Yes, following the events at Fukushima where radiation leakage has consisted almost entirely of short-chain radioisoptopes that live out their half-lives in a few hours at most - events in which emergency plant workers have only been permmitted to sustain acute radiation doses of up to 250 millisieverts over a day or two (for context, there is some risk of light radiation sickness at temporally acute exposures of 500 to 1000 millisieverts [50 to 100 rem], whilst serious radiation sickness typically requires acute exposures of 1,500 millisieverts [150 rem]; acute exposures of over 4,000 millisieverts would likely result in a 50% mortality rate). I'm not sure on the definition of "acute" exposure, but even if we're talking about just one hour, then the comparison is still absurd: if 500 millisieverts per hour is the minimum dose needed to get light, curable, radiation sickness with some increased risk of cancer, yet the emergency workers at the plant are only being exposed to 250 millisieverts per day, then it becomes clear that the media are deliberately and massively exaggerating the danger resulting from the radiation leakage at Fukushima.

Elsewhere in Dang's article:

"According to data released by the Bureau of Energy (能源局) in December 2009, nuclear plants only contribute 8.7 percent of Taiwan’s total power supply..."

That's deliberately misleading, and I know that because I'm working from the same data; the contribution of nuclear power to electricity production in 2009 was 18.10% - that only drops to 8.7% if you factor in non-electrical forms of energy (i.e. all of road transportation) - but the debate is about industrial-scale electricity production, not the gas you fill your car up with, which not only has nothing to do with nuclear energy but it has nothing to do with renewables, or coal or gas fired plants either. From that same paragraph:

"If the proportion of Taiwan’s total electricity generation derived from renewable sources could be raised from the present 4 percent to 25 percent or more by 2025, there is no reason why Tsai’s plan to phase out nuclear power by that date could not be achieved."

OK let's work with that 25% figure... Total electricity production in 2009 was 229.7 TW hours, 25% of which is about 58 TW hours - that is 18 TW hours (23%) more than the nuclear contribution. For electricity production from renewables to rise from the 4% figure of just over 9 TW hours to 58 TW hours would require a lot of money and land. Let's do the calculations for offshore wind, onshore wind and solar respectively:

For an offshore wind farm to produce 58 TW hours of energy (and here I shall extrapolate from the figures given for the London "Big Array" Turton linked to) would require an area at sea of 3770 square kilometres with a power capacity of 19,400 MW at a capital cost of NT$1.8 trillion dollars. That's a wind farm the size of 14 Taipei Cities - at sea!

For an onshore windfarm (and let's be kind and extrapolate from the figures for the Enercon E-126 turbine, rather than the absurd Roscoe farm in Texas) that would be 2,478 mega-turbines on 398 square kilometres of land at a capital cost just shy of NT$57 billion. That's much better, but it's still an onshore wind farm 40% bigger than Taipei City.

For that figure of 58 TW hours a year to be made up by solar plants (and here let's extrapolate from the figures for the solar plant in Lhuju, Kaohsiung County), the numbers are not going to look good! Taiwan has an average of 1644 hours of sunlight a year - which is 18% of the total number of hours in a year (8760). Using that 18% number for time spent across a year generating electricity at 100% of their power rating (without factoring in for cloud cover which would make the numbers look even worse), such plants would need a combined power rating of 6,600 MW, cover an area of 7,250 square kilometres (or 26.5 Taipei Cities!) and would have to be built at a capital cost of almost NT$9 trillion dollars! That, ladies and gentlemen, is why solar power on this scale would be insane. In light of these calculations - which, dear readers, I invite you to fact-check as I am in no way infallible - consider again Dang's statement:

"If the proportion of Taiwan’s total electricity generation derived from renewable sources could be raised from the present 4 percent to 25 percent or more by 2025, there is no reason why Tsai’s plan to phase out nuclear power by that date could not be achieved."

Oh yes there is Dang - here's three very good reasons:

1) In the case of offshore wind and solar, raising their proportion of total electricity production to 25% using current technology would cost so much money in capital costs alone that it would dwarf the costs of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant at Longmen quite literally by an order of magnitude.

2) In all three cases - offshore wind, solar and onshore wind - raising their proportion of total electricity production to 25% using current technology would require so much land that a Tsai administration really would need to consider some drastic moves, such as (for example) a systematic program of land theft.

3) That 25% proportion of total electricity production in Taiwan could be met far more cheaply in both capital costs and land requirements both by nuclear power and by gas-fired power plants.

Yet Dang didn't stop there. He went on - in the same unbelievable paragraph - to say this:

"It is quite possible that Taiwan could achieve the same goal that US President Barack Obama endorsed two years ago — to generate 100 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2050."

That is breathtakingly stupid. This guy must never, ever get anywhere near political power again.

*I haven't got time to fisk that piece right now, but I might get onto it later - needless to say though, Vidal is a real nasty piece of work; thyroid cancer is curable, government is not.

Addendum:

Let's assume that, for solar, instead of building solar power plants like the one at Lhuju, a Tsai government instead decides to make it compulsory for solar panels to be installed on every rooftop in each of Taiwan's major cities. Working on that assumption, would it be possible to generate anything like the amount of electricity Dang is talking about? OK well the area values for Taiwan's cities are as follows: Taipei City (273 km2), Tainan City (176km2), Taichung City (163km2), Kaohsiung City (154km2), Keelung City (133km2), Hsinchu City (104km2), Changhua City (65km2), Chiayi City (60km2), Taoyuan City (34km2), Yilan City (29km2), Hualien City (29km2) and let's add an extra 150km2 (30km2 each) for those "cities" for which I can't find figures (Taitung, Pingtung, Nantou, Yunlin and Miaoli)... that's a total of 1,370 square kilometres. That's not much. However, a lot of people do live in Taipei County (Xinbei) and Taipei County is huge (2052km2), but if we add that to our total that still only gives us 3,422 km2 (and remember these values are massively exaggerated since in reality only a fraction of these area values will consist of actual rooftops). To get 58 TW hours a year from solar panels, we'd need more than twice that value (at 7,250 km2); so with the same generous assumptions concerning the operant efficiency of solar panels made earlier (18% and no cloud cover), we'd still only get about 27.3 TW hours a year. That would leave 30.7 TW hours per year to be made up by wind or other renewables. To make up that shortfall via wind would require a wind farm (operating at an average of 30% efficiency) with a 10,500 MW capacity which would require 1,500 Enercon E-126 7 MW turbines over an area of 167 km2 (or about the same size as Taichung City). Madness!