Author: Rafe Champion

  • Rafe’s Roundup 19 Dec

    Roundup of Partners and Fellow-Travellers Drop in and see what they are up to! The Energy Realists of Australia Jo Nova Quadrant on line IPA         Climate and energy program  CIS          The Sydney Institute Menzies Research Centre  Mannkal Economics Education Foundation           Advance Australia  Taxpayers Alliance  Australian Inst for Progress The Conservative Vagabond The Rathouse and The Site of…

  • Meet the classical liberal vagabond

    There is a quiet achiever on the liberal/conservative scene, the indefatigable and mercurial Dara Macdonald. Thinker. Writer. Reader. Freedom enthusiast. Conservative Vagabond. Cocktail maker. Lawyer. Dara Macdonald is an Australian lawyer and founder. Dara has worked as in-house legal counsel for various national and multinational companies. Last year she took up a year-long research position with Australia’s…

  • Roundup 4 Dec

    Roundup of Partners and Fellow-Travellers Drop in and see what they are up to! IPA         Climate and energy program  CIS          The Sydney Institute Menzies Research Centre  Mannkal Economics Education Foundation           Advance Australia  Taxpayers Alliance  Australian Institute for Progress Save these dates 15 December at 6.0 Sydney time. Menzies Research Institute webinar forum for representatives of rural communities…

  • Support The Voice

    Enshrine racism in the Constitution Karl Popper defended equalitarian justice by which he meant equality before non-discriminatory laws and an equal distribution of the limitations on freedom that are required for a functional society. Traditional or individualistic justice, as described by Popper in his critique of Plato, “calls for equal treatment of the citizens before…

  • Roundup 25 Nov

    The New Energy Narrative It’s Time for a new narrative, a new Energy Story. The game has changed, not officially and not among the True Believers but every month it will get clearer to anyone who bothers to check. We are in damage control. The exit from coal, gas and oil has just about run…

  • SA the wind-leader!

    This morning on Wednesday Nov 23 South Australia is in a wind drought. The wind-leading state is demonstrating the great green future of Australia as we pretend to transition from coal. Before sunrise SA was importing power from Victoria and drawing almost 30% of its demand from the wind, with 70% from gas, with a…

  • Save our rural surroundings

    And our farmland and forests. The Menzies Research Institute is hosting a webinar forum on the rising tide of protests from rural communities faced with the wreck and ruin inflicted by wind and solar factories and the transmission lines associated with them. Express interest here. The date is 15 December at 6.00 Sydney time. These…

  • Book review: The scientific method

    J Scott Armstrong and Kesten Green, The Scientific  Method: A Guide to Finding Useful Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 2022.                                  Science and academic life at large have changed out of recognition since the second world war under the influence of rapid growth, increasing government control and the politicisation of the allocation of research grants. The world…

  • Let’s Lift Wind Literacy

    Reading literacy appears to be in decline and that is causing concern but spare a thought for the prevalence of “wind illiteracy.” This means lack of awareness of the wind supply, especially at the continental scale. Wind illiteracy has enabled the biggest peacetime policy blunder in our history, that is, connecting intermittent energy sources from…

  • Putting energy realism on the google map

    The Energy Realists of Australia have two sites, the original list of papers hanging off the RiteOn site and our own site, Flickerpower. It will help if these sites come up on the first page of searches and this is more likely to happen when they get more traffic directed from other sites, like this…