[...] lighting is normally used at night (this will surprise no-one). In Australia, electricity companies offer very cheap rates at night, because they have MegaWatts of capacity just spinning around with not much to do ("spinning reserve"). The lights that we use domestically offer very little loading, so where's the saving in greenhouse gases? The alternators aren't just shut down, because it takes up to 12 hours to get a large coal-fired alternator on-line.

Hi, I’m Gary and I’m a recovering Apocaholic. I am currently Apocalypse free for nearly 18 years. I left the church of the Religious Apocalypse in 1976, over 30 years ago, and I resigned from the secular church of the Financial Apocalypse in 1989. Yes, I still feel the urge to proclaim the end of all things, from time to time, but I white-knuckle my way to a history book for a little perspective, and then I breathe easier. If you wish to join AA, the only requirement is that you give up the adrenaline rush of media-fed fantasies.

If no one has even one percent of all the knowledge in a society, then it is crucial that the other 99 percent of knowledge — scattered in tiny and individually unimpressive amounts among the population at large — be allowed the freedom to be used in working out mutual accommodations among the people themselves.
These innumerable mutual interactions are what bring the other 99 percent of knowledge into play — and generate new knowledge.
That is why free markets, judicial restraint, and reliance on decisions and traditions growing out of the experiences of the many — rather than the groupthink of the elite few — are so important.

OZ EDUCATION
When new-age teachers rejected all forms of student assessment they ushered in the egalitarian or "Oz" education era. Remembering how the Wizard gave the scarecrow a diploma to make him feel he had a brain, our teachers have adopted an educational philosophy that all kids should reach year 12 and graduate with equal "Oz" diplomas.
What if this egalitarian mania was to be exploited by a sinister government? They could achieve great savings by amalgamating the Registry of Births with the Education Ministry. When each child is born the new Department would issue a combined birth-academic diploma. Grade-by-grade, teachers would be seconded — given high sounding titles — to work at the Registry writing year-by-year reports to be attached to the birth certificate. Perhaps a higher pay could help avoid union action. After 12 years all teachers would be officers at "The Registry".
Classrooms would be empty with school grounds sub-divided. Kids could hang around looking unkempt like scarecrows but with excellent certificates. Gradually the Registry Officers could be replaced by computers. Our country would be cleansed of class snobbery and take its place on an equal footing with the most ignorant of third world nations.

Jackhass

The EU, which politically and militarily wants to be compared to the US actually produces more CO2 per unit area, more CO2 per person and more CO2 in total than the USA.. But who knows that?

Boy, it's a good thing that Trujillo doesn't have a taste for hyperbole. Or he'd have been spruiking broadband as the means to cure cancer.

Carson cannot be blamed directly for these deaths. She didn't urge total bans in "Silent Spring." Instead, on the single page obliquely acknowledging DDT as an anti-malarial agent, she writes, "Practical advice should be 'Spray as little as you possibly can' rather than 'Spray to the limit of your capacity.'"

The ETU boss also sparked outrage when he said it was "going to be fun" coercing employers under Labor's IR plan.

The results, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, found that children who were overweight or obese were up to nine times more likely to become overweight adults. But Professor Alison Venn from the Menzies Research Institute in Hobart says the research also found that many people who had healthy weights as children became overweight or obese during adolescence.

In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide.

Blue Source, a US offsetting company, invites consumers to offset carbon emissions by investing in enhanced oil recovery, which pumps carbon dioxide into depleted oil wells to bring up the remaining oil. However, Blue Source said that because of the high price of oil, this process was often profitable in itself, meaning operators were making extra revenues from selling “carbon credits” for burying the carbon.