Charles Rotter

Behold the All England Club, that august bastion of strawberries, cream—and yes, the zesty, buttery splendour of the avocado—now bowing before the high priesthood of sustainability. In a move so monumentally absurd it could only spring from the fever dreams of eco-zealots, Wimbledon’s brass have decreed that avocados must go the way of the dodo, “substitut[ing] them with crushed British peas as part of sweeping sustainability measures” .

According to The Sunday Times, the ban forms part of Wimbledon’s broader environmental strategy.

The crushed pea alternative represents a shift towards locally sourced ingredients, eliminating the environmental costs associated with importing avocados from overseas.

https://www.gbnews.com/sport/tennis/wimbledon-ban-avocado

Picture it: rows of genteel Brits, tennis whites gleaming, anticipation humming through Henman Hill—only to be handed a soggy slurry of green goop. The very fruit that wound its way onto our tables for its “nutritional value,” now banished in favour of a pasty pulp so grim it makes mushy peas look like caviar . One can almost hear the avocados weeping in their compost heaps: “We came all this way from Mexico so you could sprinkle us on your toast. And this is what we get?”

This isn’t just food politics; it’s a cultural crucifixion. Avocados are more than just a guacamole ingredient—they’re an icon of modern life, a symbol of morning ritual and brunch revelry. Yet our sustainability religion, with its unproven claims and unchecked fervour, has decreed that exotic is evil, local is holy—never mind that crushed peas taste like the aftermath of a hedge-trimming accident.

What’s next? Will they ban strawberries because they’re shipped from warm fields at the cost of a few extra carbon atoms? Will the hallowed cream be replaced with powdered oat slurry to save a teaspoon of bovine methane? If Wimbledon surrenders its most beloved indulgence for a mealy mash that even the rabbits in the grounds won’t touch, then nothing—not even tradition, taste or sanity—is safe from this eco-dictatorship.

The real tragedy isn’t that a tennis tournament has lost its avocado; it’s that a once-proud nation appears ready to let a few grams of carbon guilt rob us of simple pleasures. In the name of an “environmental strategy” that treats us like lab rats in a global-warming experiment, we’re surrendering joy and flavour at the altar of crushing carbon—a crusade that, in its earnestness, feels like a caricature of virtue itself.

So here’s to crushed peas—this year’s official taste of virtue. May they remind us that when sustainability becomes a religion, it devours everything that once made life worth living.

From THE DAILY CALLER

Adam Pack
Congressional Reporter

The Senate dealt a series of blows to solar and wind energy in the latest version of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill — taking a page out of House Republicans’ playbook to crack down on green energy tax credits enacted under former President Joe Biden.

The Senate’s new proposal would move up the deadline for solar and wind projects hoping to qualify for production and investment tax credits by requiring them to produce electricity by the end of 2027. The additional cuts to green energy tax credits follows the president’s public broadside against the upper chamber’s initial proposal, which delayed the termination of solar and wind subsidies. (RELATED: Trump Calls On Waffling Congress To Crush Biden’s Green ‘SCAM’)

“Windmills, and the rest of this ‘JUNK,’ are the most expensive and inefficient energy in the world, is destroying the beauty of the environment, and is 10 times more costly than any other energy,” Trump wrote in a post to Truth Social on June 21. “It is time to break away, finally, from this craziness!!!”

The upper chamber’s revised bill would also create a new tax on wind and solar projects whose components are sourced from foreign entities of concern, such as China.

Senate Democrats referred to the creation of a new excise tax penalizing the renewable industry’s reliance on Chinese materials as “economic self-sabotage” and an “outright massacre” for the solar and wind industry.

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee was one of several GOP senators pushing the upper chamber to aggressively crack down on solar and wind tax credits in the president’s landmark bill. The Utah Republican favors a wholesale repeal of green energy subsidies, though Congress is likely to stop short of that given opposition from moderate Republicans.

Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis told reporters Saturday that the Senate finance panel’s decision to accelerate the termination of solar and wind subsidies by the end of 2027 was “disappointing.” He also suggested that failure to maintain the green energy tax breaks would have negative economic consequences for his state.

Tillis is one of several GOP senators that has pledged to vote against the president’s landmark tax and immigration bill, citing the legislation’s reforms to Medicaid.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) lead, blasted Senate Republicans for rolling back green energy subsidies within their proposal, accusing GOP senators of putting “millions of jobs” on the chopping block.

“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” Musk, the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer, Tesla, wrote on his social media platform, X. “Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

Proponents of terminating green energy subsidies argued that the green energy industry’s messaging revealed its dependency on government funds in order to be profitable.

“If, as supporters of the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] are complaining, repealing these subsidies will ‘kill’ their industry, then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place,” American Energy Alliance president Tom Pyle said in a statement Saturday. “Extending green giveaways on the backs of American taxpayers is shortsighted and neglectful.”

The conservative House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has also urged the Senate to adopt the House-passed language that put solar and wind tax credits on a faster route to termination.

Several HFC members, including Republican Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, suggested they would not vote for the Senate’s proposal if it failed to adhere to the House language accelerating the termination of green energy subsidies.

“That’s got to go,” Norman told the DCNF in an interview Thursday. “The President wants it to go. He wants to abolish all of them. We agree with that.”

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Ecologists like to think they know good habitat when they see it. “Yep,” they’ll say. “That’s good habitat.” Or: “Nope, that has no wildlife value.”

As an ecologist, I do the same. Take me somewhere and I will form an opinion about the nature potential of a patch of ground in a few seconds. Will I be right, or not? Who knows. Will another ecologist agree with me? Ditto.

It’s all about feel, I guess, but you can’t deal in feel. You need a way of putting a number on things, giving habitat an objective value. An ecologist thinks he or she knows a good great-crested newt pond when looking at it. But can the ecologist say why the pond is good, or how much better it is than the one a hundred meters away? Is it possible to quickly measure things, with little or no experience as an ecologist, and come up with a viable answer as to how good the pond is compared to different ponds measured in different places on different days by different people?

Well, about 15 years ago an outfit called ARG UK (Amphibian and Reptile Groups) came up with a way of quick-scoring a pond for its suitability for great-crested newts. It’s called a Habitat Suitability Index, or HSI. Ten variables are assessed, and given a score from 0.01 (awful) to 1 (perfect) and you then multiply all ten together and take the tenth root of the resulting number. This gives you the HSI, a quick assessment of how good the pond is.

Now, about 3 years ago, I decided to create a similar way of rating electricity generators. It was to be a PSI – a Power Suitability Index. It would objectively compare different generators, to see how suitable each was to power modern civilisation. I decided to measure ten properties of electricity generators, give them a score, multiply them together, and take the tenth root. However, I couldn’t think of a valid way to get a set of scores that would be objective and immune to the accusation that a thumb had been placed on the scales, or the sub-indices, in order to get the outcome I wanted. My sub-indices were things like cost, capacity factor, and so on. So far so easy. But some sub-indices were harder to put a number on: variability, environmental impact, things like that. (We know wind is variable, but what score does it get? How predictable is that variability? Solar is somewhat more predictable, inasmuch as it never produces at night. Does offshore wind score higher than onshore for variability, or only capacity factor? Etc.)

Anyway, I was easily deterred, but resolved to come back to the issue, but never did. Until today. David Turver has recently posted “Physics First Energy Policy” on the Eigen Values Substack, and included in that assessment is a table of data for eight different properties of electrical generators. I copied the numbers, I hope faithfully, into a spreadsheet:

Well, this set of data lent itself perfectly to my long-abandoned idea for a Power Suitability Index. There are only eight variables, and therefore eight sub-indices, so once all the sub-indices are multiplied together, you then take the eighth root, not the tenth. The scoring is simple enough. The “best” value at any of the variables gets a one. If a high number is good, then other generators get a score of the “best” value divided by their value. If a high number is bad, the other generators get a score of their value divided by the “best value.”

There is only one “questionable” score – where Reliable generators score one, what do Intermittent generators score? I’ve put 0.1 – but it could be unfairly low.

Here’s how the sub-indices are calculated:

And here are the resulting sub-indices for all the generators, to two decimal places:

What about the results?

Biomass is objectively the worst (because it benefits from scoring 1 for the reliability sub-index, but still loses) at a score of 0.06. Wind and solar PV are joint 5^th, scoring 0.10. Coal in 4^th scores 0.12, Hydro in 3^rd has 0.24, Gas in 2^nd scores 0.25, and winning by a country mile on this attempt at a PSI is nuclear, with a whopping 0.79 out of 1.

So there you have it. Should anyone have suggestions for other sub-indices, or for a different score than 0.1 for intermittent generators for the Reliability sub-index, I’m all ears. Some may argue with the figures that give rise to the sub-indices, or note that wind is not split between offshore and onshore, etc. But I tend to think that future tweaks will still result in the same winner.

/message ends