All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
News

What happens when government gets involved in energy production?

Leave a comment

Consider this story from Canada, found in the National Post.

Excerpt:

A $200-million wind farm in northern New Brunswick is frozen solid, cutting off a potential supply of renewable energy for NB Power.

The 25-kilometre stretch of wind turbines, located 70 kilometres northwest of Bathurst, N.B. has been completely shutdown for several weeks due to heavy ice covering the blades.

[…]Wintery conditions also temporarily shutdown the site last winter, just months after its completion. Some or all of the turbines were offline for several days, with “particularly severe icing” blamed.

The accumulated ice alters the aerodynamics of the blades, rendering them ineffective as airfoils. The added weight further immobilizes the structures.

[…]Melissa Morton, a spokeswoman for the utility, says the contract isn’t based on power delivered during a specific period, but rather on an annual basis.

“Our hopes is that it will balance out over the 12-month period and, historically, that has been the case.”

Despite running into problems in consecutive winters, Ms. Morton says NB Power doesn’t have concerns about the reliability of the supply from the Caribou Mountain site.

This story has the word Wintery in it, and spelled correctly, too. That is a good thing. However, government-run utilities wasting taxpayer money on environmentalist nonsense is a bad thing. Maybe the taxpayer-funded wind farm is doing such a good job of stopping global warming that we are now seeing global cooling?

And remember that the Ontario government provides subsidies to private companies for inefficient solar power. More waste.

Now consider this post from Red State, found in Neil Simpson’s latest round-up.

Excerpt:

As taxpayer tragedies go, Broomfield, Colorado-based Range Fuels has all the plot elements—splashy headlines, subsidies and opportunistic venture capitalists. Range got its start in 2006 when George W. Bush used a State of the Union address to extol wood chips as a source for cellulosic ethanol that would break America’s “addiction to oil.” Mr. Bush pledged that with government funding cellulosic ethanol would be “practical and competitive within six years.”

Vinod Khosla stepped in with his hand out. The political venture capitalist founded Range Fuels and in March 2007 it received a $76 million grant from the Department of Energy—one of six cellulosic projects the Bush Administration selected for $385 million in grants. Range said it would build the nation’s first commercial cellulosic plant, near Soperton, Georgia, using wood chips to produce 20 million gallons a year in 2008, with a goal of 100 million gallons. Estimated cost: $150 million.

… the EPA said Range would finally produce some fuel in 2010—but only four million gallons, not 100 million, and of methanol, not cellulosic ethanol. So taxpayers have committed $162 million (along with at least that much in private financing) to produce four million gallons of a biofuel that others have been making in quantity for decades.

Yes, George W. Bush made some mistakes… but there is someone even worse.

From USA Today, we learn the consequences of Obama’s moratorium on oil drilling. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

Seahawk Drilling Inc. said it has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to sell its fleet of offshore drilling rigs to a competitor for $105 million.

Seahawk, which announced the deal with Hercules Offshore Inc. Friday, has been hurt by a slowdown in Gulf of Mexico drilling after the BP oil spill last April. The government halted drilling in deep waters and imposed tough new rules that have curtained all energy exploration in U.S. waters.

Bottom line – keep government out of the free market.

News

Report finds women outpacing men in educational attainment

3 Comments

From the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Young women are outpacing men in educational attainment and there’s little sign males will make up ground any time soon.

Nearly one in four women had earned a bachelor’s degree by the time they reached age 23, compared to just one in seven men, the Labor Department said Wednesday. And while a growing share of professions are expected to require a college education in the future, men don’t appear poised to make up the education gap.

The Labor Department’s report was based on a long-term survey of Americans born between 1980 and 1984. The results are from the latest round of questioning, which took place in 2008 and 2009 when respondents ranged from 23 to 29-years-old.

Because the same percentage of males and females — 16% — were enrolled in college at age 23 “it is unlikely the gap in educational attainment will close in the next few years,” according to the report.

Women were also less likely to have dropped out of high school or opted not to enroll in college.

Those with the most education were also the most likely to hold jobs at the age of 23. Some 89% of bachelor’s-degree holders were employed compared to 75% of high school graduates.

But for many education levels men tended to be more likely to hold a job. Those young men who had dropped out of high school, only attained a high school degree or had some college experience (but no bachelor’s degree) were more likely to be employed at 23 than their female counterparts.

There is currently a lot of legislation that discriminates in favor of women in the schools (Title IX, etc.). Not only that, but the vast majority of teachers are female, which puts the education of boys in peril.

Podcasts

William Lane Craig on Sam Harris’ attempt to ground morality with science

55 Comments

William Lane Craig is going to be debating atheist Sam Harris in April, so I thought that I would link to a couple of resources in which Craig assesses Harris’ views. Harris thinks that you can use science to discover an objective morality. Does his view make sense?

Here’s an audio clip from Youtube:

And in this MP3 file, Craig assesses Harris’ attempt to grounded morality on naturalism.

Topics:

  • Harris opposes ground moral values and moral duties on a theistic worldview
  • Harris thinks that the factual statements made by science can ground moral values and moral duties
  • Harris thinks that these findings of science lead to an objective morality
  • Harris’ view is that what is “good” is what contributes to “human well-being”
  • Human happiness and flourishing is “good” and human unhappiness and decline is “evil”
  • Craig agrees that science can show what factors contribute to human flourishing
  • On atheism, there is no reason to select the fourishing of human beings as “good”
  • Craig asks: why say that human well-being and flourishing is a moral good?
  • there are non-moral uses of the word “good” and moral uses of the word “good”
  • the moral sense of “good” refers to the “good life” and what we ought to do to be good
  • Harris equivocates between different uses of the word good
  • in chess, there are good moves and bad moves with respect to winning the game – but that’s not moral good
  • similarly, someone who cleans your yard can do a good job or a bad job – but that’s not moral good
  • what is the explanation, on atheism, for human flourishing having the moral dimension of being “good”?
  • how does Harris deal with the fact-value divide? (the fallacy of deriving an ought from an is)
  • how does Harris leap from facts about brains to the moral property of “goodness”?
  • what scientific experiments does Harris propose to show that human flourishing is the “good”?
  • is Harris’ view just utilitarianism? (the view that the good is whatever makes the most number of people happy)
  • can Harris ground human rights like the right to life on his view?
  • Can human rights be overridden if it makes lots of people happy, on Harris’ view?
  • does Harris’ view lead to eugenics? how could Harris oppose the elimination of the weak or undesirables?

I think the question that Sam Harris has to answer is this: on atheism, why should a person limit their own pursuit of happiness when they can be more happy by being selfish and spurning the “flourishing of humans”? Why should any individual atheist care about the flourishing of humans when self-sacrificial actions to improve the flourishing of others diminishes his own happiness?

You can hear even more about Harris’ views from New Zealand philosopher Glenn Peoples.