No doubt Family First’s advertising agency is licking its lips about Bob Brown’s recent “phase out coal in three years” comments. That’s on the not too implausible assumption that they’re going to make some more ads this year like the “Greens are extreme” ones that ran in 2004.
Politically, it’s hard to see what the Greens hope to gain from Brown’s statement. It’s probably right, as a number of commentators have said, that it’s a response to the political mainstreaming of climate change as an issue and in particular to the framing of the political issue as a contest between Turnbull and Garrett (with the Greens left on the sidelines). And Bob Brown always likes the media spotlight. But they’re can’t be any votes in it for the Greens – and I’d have thought a lot to lose.
In Brown’s defence, I guess he’s dramatising the urgency of the issue. But I’d have thought that the risk is that it feeds commentary which is always alert for signs of “climate change alarmism” to backtrack on the reluctant conversion to climate change realism that many pollies and news outlets have undergone over the past few months. An unintended consequence of such a response, of course, might be to cast the Labor Party’s argument as more convincing (not that I think the argument that Howard et al are opportunistic converts needs much bolstering). John Quiggin alludes to this as well, and a related theme:
Unfortunately, the recent suggestions by Tim Flannery and Bob Brown that Australia should close down its coal industry only go to reinforce the claims of people like Samuelson. It’s notable that the Oz, which is trying, like others, to switch from outright denialism to a phony pose of moderation, jumped on these comments with glee.
There does seem to be, in parts of the Green movement, a “hair shirt� feeling that unless policy requires painful sacrifices, it can’t be doing any good**. So, we get opposition to the use of offsets to neutralise emissions, and a reluctance to look at possible options like carbon sequestration.
The other comment I’d make on the politics of Brown’s announcement is that it really does anger me when flip comments about “retraining” workers are made. I’m not a fan of logging, but it was ludicrous to suggest that fifty year old loggers could suddenly reinvent themselves as tourism workers. Similarly, the way that economic transitions work in practice is that the death of old industries often casts those who work in them on the scrap heap (think of the very large demographic of former manufacturing employees whose permanent unemployability is disguised by the disability pension) while the new industries are attracting a very different cohort of employees. Such transitions are not seamless by any stretch of the imagination, and in fact the perception that they are has everything in common with the attitude that firing workers is fine because the economy will rationally allocate labour to demand. It’s right wing economics, basically. It ignores the established lives, interests and communities of those who work in coal mining. It must be very disappointing to the CFMEU who’ve been making a good faith effort to think about the future of employment in coal in terms of changes required by the need to cut emissions.
I have to say that these remarks by Bob Brown have lessened my respect for him considerably. He’s proved he can command media attention, but proved nothing about serious policy, or in my view, the real issues raised for those whose livelihood depends on the coal industry.
Elsewhere: A very good post on this issue from Andrew Bartlett.
Update: Jeremy Sear writes at Anonymous Lefty that Brown’s remarks have been misinterpreted by the Murdoch press. I’m inclined to agree with Andrew Bartlett – Brown’s remarks in the interview (which I’d read before posting) are ambiguous, but I’m happy to accept the interpretation. However, it doesn’t change my view of the necessity and political wisdom of Brown’s approach.
Good on him. It’s going to make Howard’s attempts to frame the ALP as extremists more difficult.
There is that!
Mark, your post is an object lesson in why you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the papers. It really is a good idea to do a bit of fact checking, as Paul Kelly in the Australian should have done yesterday (if he wasn’t deliberately lying).
Brown didn’t say phase out coal in three years. He called for Labor and the Coalition to “commit to developing a plan, within three years of election, to ending coal exports”.
As for jobs. Whole industries have been closed down in Australia without a second thought (remember textiles, clothing and footwear; whitegoods manufacturing; the steel industry; most of the car industry) not for any good social reason, but simply because big companies could make more money by shifting their operations elsewhere.
The TCF closures, in particular, occurred during the Hawke-Keating ascendancy, so please don’t try to make out Labor is interested in protecting jobs. It is for sale to the highest corporate bidder, just like the Liberals.
There are good social reasons to phase out coal, but that’s fairyland according to Kelly and others, because there are profits to be made in coal, and that’s all that matters. Whether humanity chokes on its own shit is a secondary issue in this view.
Extractive industries throughout Australian history have exhausted resources and moved on, and the timber and mining companies never have shed any tears for the 50-year old workers they tossed on the scrapheap. So spare us the malarkey about jobs. Big companies make decisions about profits, not about the welfare of their workers.
There will be a scramble for votes in the coal seats, and as usual in electoral politics that has nothing to do with good long-term policy. It has everything to do with short-term demagogy.
To quote from the actual interview:
“We are exporting to the world what is effectively a deadly threat to the whole planet and to our children…I am talking about having a plan, within one term of government, for the phasing-out of coal.” (Brown)
To quote your linked article:
“To suddenly ban coal exports would be massively dislocating but we have got to do it and we have to do it within a period (a three-year term) of a government,”
Sounds to me like “it” is the “plan” to phase out coal. Unlike what you have just written in your blog which says: “phase out coal in three yearsâ€?.
Just because News Limited puts a spin on the interview and many other outlets run with the same spin, doesn’t change the intent of what was said.
Unless you are suggesting that governments not plan for our future?
Mark do you understand the science or don’t you?
If you understand the science then why the hell are you trying to spread dangerous and malevolent lies and scare-stories.
And if you don’t understand the science why not go where the chips fall.
Now I know the answer to this by the way. I know the reason why you won’t act like a responsible adult and its the same reason why you get a marxist lunatic like Trotsky posting for you.
It not affirmative action for the mentally disturbed. Thats not the reason commie.
Mark :
But why should these loggers be privileged over the (far greater numbers) of manufacturing workers who have suffered such a fate,( to use your example) in order to sustain an irresponsible and destructive industry ? An industry which is doomed in any case, insofar as it is based on the removal of limited and non-renewable resources.
Everyone in this society is expected to “adapt” and to “move with the changing times” – except those who work in the logging industries ? This assumption just doesn’t make any sense to me, nor does it seem even remotely just, given what tens of thousands of other workers have had to cope with over the last decade.
WRT the coal industry – undoubtedly currently important , it is also a major cause (and symptom) of the predicament(s) currently being faced by our global civilisation and the biosphere.
However, if the reality of these problems is accepted, then ALL solutions available to mitigate against the coming disaster have to be considered, and it seems foolish in the extreme to rule out taking action against such an obvious (and significant) contributor to the problems of climate change and biosphere damage.
This more particularly so, when similar actions have been taken (WRT employment loss, etc.,), in many industries, in the name of “increased profits” or “improved competitiveness”, for instance, with little or no objection, excepting for those immediately involved.
This has nothing to do with “hair shirts” but is more a recognition that the “economy” is something that should work for us, and support the systems upon which we depend, rather than vice versa.
Austin that is a really good point. Do you have a link to the text of the interview which was with Fran Kelly on Breakfast.
Meanwhile Beattie is planning a plan to start construction of the world’s first ‘clean’ coal power station in six or seven years. He might even have it finished within the decade that people like Flannery and Brown designate as the lead time.
I say’clean’ because it won’t be, of course, not completely. Coal produces considerable emissions in the mining process, whereas with solar, wind and geothermal once you are set up the process is as clean as can be.
From memory James Hanson proposed that no traditional coal power stations should be built in the advanced economies after 2012 and a decade later ditto in the developing world. At that time we should start decommissioning dirty coal power stations.
If we took three years for the world to adopt this plan we would fail to meet Hansen’s schedule, which again is probably slower than it should be. As I’ve said before, the situation is serious.
“No doubt Family First’s advertising agency is licking its lips about Bob Brown’s recent “phase out coal in three yearsâ€? comments. That’s on the not too implausible assumption that they’re going to make some more ads this year like the “Greens are extremeâ€? ones that ran in 2004.”
Why should the Greens give a damn about what Family First will make of the suggestion that Bob Brown made? Anything he says is likely to be distorted. Branches of the media can do just that as quickly as 24 hours as Austin has clearly shown, with the link you provided. No point worrying about what the lunatic fringe will make of your pronouncements, let alone partisan media moguls.
While I know nothing of current Green internal politics, it is always possible that Senator Brown made his remarks at least partly to accommodate a group/faction/tendency/loose alignment inside the Greens.
The Greens only need 14.25% of the vote after preferences, not 50%, so maybe they think this is a good way of going for the niche.
Assuming for the sake of argument that logging and coal mining are indeed ‘irresponsible and destructive’, I don’t think that Mark is arguing that logging or mining jobs should necessarily be kept or privileged.
Mark appears to be saying that retraining and adjustment needs to be taken into account, and that it will be neither painless nor easy.
I’ve met a few people who say things like ‘but ecotourism is really profitable these days’, and I think it’s really important to go beyond that attitude if you are going to sell your policies to people.
The Qld Greens climate change policy, while more sophiticated than that, is light on detail.
Just because many ex-manufacturing workers have been abandoned, does not mean that timber workers or coal miners should be abandoned too. It means that we also need to go back for people who have been left behind by the same
DJ :
I don’t support (and don’t consider my arguments do either) actions of this nature – in fact, I think the treatment of the affected people has been disgraceful, to say the least.
This does not amount, however, to acceptance of the argument that no meaningful action should be taken to address the coal (or timber industries) because of the economic and social factors at work – but then, I believe that we are facing a significant number of threats to both the biosphere and our civilisation through the changes we are making to the “global life support systems”.
I agree, – but that’s the sort we are living with, and acknowledgment does not amount to acceptance, in my book.
Got to agree with this, it’s just the reference to the timber workers in Mark’s post ignores the fact that they have been getting preferential treatment over the tens of thousands of other workers who have lost their jobs for much less justification.
As a disclaimer, I have to also add. that the disgraceful antics of the CFMEU in Tasmania, prior to the last federal election still disgust me.
Well I think the Tasmanian branch of the CFMEU did exactly the right thing by its timber-worker members. (I’m not particularly anti-logging myself).
However, if your political goal is to get rid of the timber industry on the grounds that the jobs created are not worth the environmental damage, you’ll need to find a way to not leave the timber-workers out in the cold.
I don’t know the details, but, assuming for the sake of argument that they have been privileged, you’d need a political strategy that would let someone lead willing timber workers to a different industry.
Complaining about that privilege would, in my opinion, make them dig their heels in more and make what you want less likely. It’s unrealistic to expect people to co-operate in their own unemployment, even if they are getting an unfair advantage.
It is “Disgraceful” for a union to act in the best interests of the membership?
The “worker’s party” was going to sell out workers, so they switched their vote. Gee, did anyone expect them to vote themselves out of a job?
“you’ll need to find a way to not leave the timber-workers out in the cold.”
Labor’s promise of no net job losses and a $800 million structural readjustment package ($2 million per affected timber worker) was hardly ‘leaving workers out in the cold’.
I agree with Mark’s point that the word ‘retraining’ rolls too easily of the tongue, I think he might be overstating the problem a bit. In Tas, we were talking about *400* affected workers and an restructuring package that could have moved younger workers out of other logging areas and relocated others.
Brown says under 25 000 people in the coal industry, but how many of them are 50 y.o. miners who can only mine coal and only coal?
d
The (native forests based) timber industry is “a dead man walking” – given that it is based upon the removal of a limited resource (native forests) and its replacement with plantations.
Thus any argument about the future of timber workers has to take this fact into account.
Given that change is inevitable – the only question remaining wrt to the native forests based industry is
” Do we stop while there’s some left, or cut it all down, and then be forced (by lack of supply) to stop/change our practices ?”. I won’t expand any further on this point as it is becoming OT.
WRT the actions of the CFMEU (Forestry) division’s actions in Tasmania:
1. They were active in turning down over $800 million (offered by Latham) for the required restructuring of timber workers jobs – this is far more than has been made available to any other group of workers in similar circumstances, and considering the numbers (600 directly employed workers and the additional (up to) 2000 ancillary workers), pretty generous, to say the least.
2. In supporting ratty, the union acted to support the election of one who has dedicated his life to the destruction of union power, in the interests of capital – which, to my way of thinking was hardly in the best interests of its membership.
So no, SATP, I don’t think it is disgraceful for a union to act in the best interests of its members, I just don’t think it did so.
If Bob is feeling left out of the debate, he should just chill and keep his powder dry. Neither major party has actually articulated their position yet, and london to a brick says there’ll be miles of electoral room left for the Greens when they do.
Id say the Greens can expect a one-off impact on their vote this election, as mainstrem parties jostle for cred on the issue – but 6 months from now we’ll probably have:
1. A Howard policy of free handouts to coal for R&D, with an policy no doubt allowing a 10% increase in net emmissions
2. An ALP policy based far too heavily on “clean coal” (erm, coal is a lump of carbon), some minor solar R&D initiatives, and promising 10% reductions by 2030, or similar. Nice, but not nearly adequate to addres the problem. And the old Garrett looking like Banquo’s ghost in shadow cabinet.
IMHO, Greens should focus their rhetoric on making coal redundant, not proscribed. Even that puts them away out ahead of the majors on radical solutions. Combine it will a trade/aid solar export industry – so that Australian intitaives reduce emissions globally, not just nationally.
I actually agree with BBs sentiment – bold action now! But its just a mainstream cred issue.
“If Bob is feeling left out of the debate, he should just chill and keep his powder dry.”
“I actually agree with BBs sentiment – bold action now! But its just a mainstream cred issue.”
IMHO , the stuff about Bob craving publicity, so much that he has gone out on a limb, is also made up. He’s more clued up about the consequences of carbon emissions than most and has called it as he sees it. We are in deep shit . Rudd and Howard are just talking and doing bugger all. He’s come out with a very obvious suggestion, based on how he really see’s it, and I don’t think mainstream cred, for the greens, even enters his mind.
And thank ramen for that.
Yes, exactly.
Two more points:
1. The CFMEU (Forestry division) and the CFMEU (Mining division) are for all intents and purposes two separate organisations.
2. To reject Brown’s “plan” is not necessarily to suggest nothing should be done. It’s not an either/or.
Ken Lovell points out that Brown has a history of being right.
I have to say Bob Brown was just saying the truth that no-one dare utter – that there is only a limited future in coal and renewable energies are the only possible long-term alternative. Even nuclear power is limited, since the world’s reserves of uranium are due to conk out in 60 years at current rate of consumption. I believe the Greens are the Elven light shining ever onwards in the dank rocky twisted dark tunnel of the Howard years and they are probably not interested in sucking up to any constituents. The things they say today might sound extremist, but I’m sure future generations will be accepting them as normal.
And what is so bad, evil and wrong about renewable energies? Howard is never done piddling all over this alternative, yet all over the world countries are busily developing renewable energy technology. The ineluctable fact is that a coal industry, protected by emissions trading schemes and massaged with clean technology will lose its primacy in the energy production business anyway due to reduced demand and new technology. But why is this so sad and so unprecedented? Throughout the Industrial Revolution industries and jobs became redundant as new technology took their places, but I’m sure a managed approach to changing people from one industry to another would have a better outcome than leaving it all to free market forces and a lack of forward planning the way the Howard government is going. Anyway why should coal be such a sacred cow – nasty, dirty, ugly, fume emitting, unhealthy asthma-causing, fuel for electricity as it is? Why would it be so difficult to work on rustling up other export industries?
As far as redundant coal miners are concerned, Bob Brown was not talking about jobs in tourism, but about the renewable energies industry, which has huge potential for jobs. For instance, there is a strong possibility for developing geo-thermal powered plants in the Hunter Valley, which is home to an established coal industry. However Johnny Howard is ceasing even his meagre funding of the renewable energies industry after 2007, thus killing off so many chances for a vibrant industry that will contribute a motzah to the Australian economy in terms of jobs, exports and healthy emission free electricity. Go figure….
Megan, I can’t disagree more.
Bob Brown is proposing a stunt that will greatly disrupt the economy, throw our relations with our trading partners into turmoil (we have long-term contracts with our coal customers, you know) and won’t achieve any reduction in global emissions. There is no shortage of coal, globally; the only shortage is of machinery to dig it up and ships to transport it. Other suppliers would fill the gap very quickly.
Incidentally, there is no shortage of uranium either. The “50 years” figure refers to proved reserves, and bears little resemblance to how much uranium is actually out there. Check out these IAEA estimates. You only go looking for more when the current demand isn’t being met.
Furthermore, what Quiggin said. Sacrifice just for the sake of sacrifice I’ll leave to the religious types, thanks very much.
What Megan said.
The Greens have been good, there is no other group, political organisation to compare with them, but they don’t go far enough. They/we need to go further. If, tomorrow, energy were made free and unlimited for the world’s population the results would be catastrophic in short order.
Growth might be the alpha and omega of national and international economies but limits to growth do exist and until this is recognised and acted on we will just keep chasing our tails in an orgy of production, accumulation, waste and ecological destruction.
Reserves of coal, like other radically non-renewable fossil fuel inputs, mean that this energy source will end, and the sooner the better. We can’t wait a hundred years or what it will take to mine and burn it all and the planet won’t stand it. Nuclear power is an unacceptable alternative. Renewable sources of energy are not a short-term solution and arguably never will be on their own
In any case, such measures of themselves can not stop the slide towards eco-catastrophe. Only a basic change in patterns of production and use can allow ecologically appropriate technologies to have their beneficial effect. But this means a basic change in need patterns and in the whole way life is lived.
This is the whole different radical level of thinking and planning. What is so scary about going there?
That’s highly unlikely. Because demand for uranium has been stagnant due to the unpopularity of nuclear power nobody has been looking for the stuff. If demand increases then so will the price and with it both the known reserves that are not considered viable at current prices and other, as yet undiscovered, reserves that it becomes economically viable to look for.
Here is a paper that argues that the world’s uranium supplies could last at least two hundred years (others argue up to a thousand years). http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm
It is a separate issue as to whether nuclear power is a path the pursue because of waste disposal, security and other considerations.
Want our kids smoking marijuana?
Maybe not smoking, but taking if they have multiple sclerosis, well yes maybe.
A medication that is now a legal treatment in the UK for this purpose…
Cannabis and MS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4286435.stm
Or maybe we want our fading baby boomers getting on to some in order to avoid their fate as demented old timers… something that might benefit Australia, rather than having said folks in the government.
Cannabis and Alzheimer’s
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/662254.stm
With at least 5000 years of use by humans for food, medicine, fibre and spiritual sustenance, this plant is probably going to survive the coming changes better than humans.
Still, if we acknowledged the value of said plant and its numerous beneficial uses, that would make the wasted time and resource of the failed war on drugs look even more foolish wouldn’t it, and we couldn’t have that.
Even worse perhaps, if we couldn’t reduce a complex and significant issue in our society to a simple quip and use the name of a herb as a euphemism for prejudice about other humans, where would we be?
We’d never want any complex but perhaps inconvenient truths surfacing in our wonderful land would we?
In a way it would be poetic justice to my mind if the people who refuse to see what might be of benefit to them end up wallowing in a state of dementia… a truth awaiting very many Australians currently.
More recent (2005) story on cannabis now officially available in UK (and Canada) as a medication for MS.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4438498.stm
Still, in currently pig headed Australia we see no movement at the station.
More like stunned mullet if you mention something that happens to pop their little thought bubble about the way world is.
A large percentage of coal is not used for the production of electricity but in the production of iron and steel in blast furnaces and in the production of cement in kilns. These products are used for the building of things like ships, trains, buses, cars, housing, hospitals, schools, bridges and roads.
Can you suggest an environmentally friendly, renewable alternative to coal in the production of iron, steel and cement or are these commodities we should go without. Will your answer be convincing to the ill-housed of, say, Asia, who would like to have a decent roof over their heads, at least of corrugated iron and certainly not of thatch?
Just on coal, I agree with Robert that a unilateral cessation of mining in Australia would be a futile gesture. Leighton Holdings who are the biggest mining contractor in Australia also operate in Indonesia. They’d just pack up their gear and go over there.
But some of the coal is going to have to be left in the ground, I suspect. There was some discussion on the RealClimate IPCC thread about how many Gt of coal there were in the ground compared to how many Gt of carbon is floating in the atmosphere. (I can’t find it in a rush amongst the 53,000 plus words in the thread.) There is also a suggestion that as other forms of carbon dwindle coal will be increasingly brought into play to actually make oil or as an oil and gas substitute. With this was the suggestion that energy efficiency may actually decline in the future if we go down that track.
I’d like to believe in geosequestration, but I can mainly see it as an interim solution at best, given that CO2 is 3.67 times the mass of carbon, that it is pretty nasty stuff stored and that capturing, transporting and storing requires significantly more energy than letting it rip. There is far too much in the ground to think of storing it after use as CO2 in the atmosphere.
Long term we should probably reserve coal for the uses, some of which were identified by GregM where it is difficult or impossible to substitute.
PM, the title was a sarcastic reference to FF ads from the last election. I’m all for decriminalising marijuana use.
Andrew Bartlett has posted on this issue:
http://www.andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1331
OK Greg M, I’ve read all the rhubarb on the uranium link and sure enough there are ‘known knowns, known unknowns and even unknown unknowns’ about the future availability of uranium in the world – therefore the supply of uranium is unassailably limitless. Your logic is a scream and you tell me I’m a religious type (which I’m not).
I can also say then that we will surely develop a set of sure fire emission free constant supply whiz bang you beaut renewable energy power stations that will take care of all our electricity needs, given time and investment in R&D. How do you know we can’t? After all, all the tories from Johnny Howard downwards are earnestly banking on the fact that geosequestration is a sure fire thing even though it hasn’t ever been tried on this scale. So why ignore renewable energies technology? Read the Final Report on http://www.rega.com.au/Documents/Publications/
Megan, where have I ever called you a religious type?
My post was merely to point out something anyone who knows about resources and the laws of supply and demand would be aware of. In doing so I have not advocated the use of nuclear energy but have addressed only the issue of uranium’s supposed scarcity if that path were pursued. There are good reasons why we should not pursue nuclear energy but scarcity of resources is not one of them. If you can’t accept that logic then I don’t think you are seriously engaging in the debate.
Maybe we can and I hope we can. There are billions of people who live in less privileged places than Australia and who do not have access to cheap and reliable electricity and whose quality of life is greatly diminished by that fact. I would dearly love all of them to have access to electricity if it is not at the expense of damaging the environment. I am currently living in one such country where the great majority of people don’t have access to electricity at all and it certainly diminishes their quality of life.
That is not to say that in Australia we should not be efficient and conservative in our own use of electricity, even if there was a sure fire emission free constant supply, although that will have not the slightest impact upon the availability of electricity in developing countries.
By the way your link doesn’t work.
Brian, at least in the Australian context, I believe the boffins are confident that there is enough space to geosequester our CO2 emissions safely for so long into the future that’s it’s not really of concern. I remain somewhat skeptical as well, but there you go.
Megan, as a backstop, there is a limitless supply of uranium in seawater. There’s some Japanese researchers who reckon they can extract it, with present technology, at around $250 per kilogram or so. Even that price only adds in the order of a cent per kilowatt-hour to the cost of electricity – less, because at that price it’s worth refining it extra-hard to get every last skerrick of burnable uranium out of the fuel. And that’s ignoring reprocessing (known technology, though uneconomic at present uranium prices), thorium as fuel (being tried in Russian and Indian reactors right now – there are orders of magnitude more usable thorium fuel than uranium), and fast breeder reactors. As GregM says, there are perfectly sensible reasons to be doubtful of nuclear power. Fuel availability is not one of them.
Dammit GregM, you’re right my link doesn’t work. Sorry! Try:
http://www.rega.com.au/reports.htm , or check out the website for Renewable Energy Generators Australia (REGA), or rega.com and download the report on their publications list.
Yes I see now that you did not accuse me of being a religious type. That was Robert Merkel, so please once again accept my grovelling apologies. Anyway, back to the debate. Ok so you and Robert Merkel see scarcity as no argument against uranium. Having read the link, and Merkel’s last post I can see what you’re getting at.
But Robert, you make out uranium extraction from seawater would be so cheap. However to the cost of extracting uranium from seawater or whatever, you would just have to add on the cost of creating nuclear power, the cost of disposing of the nuclear waste and the cost that any nuclear accidents would cause to the community. By contrast geo-thermal power used in Iceland is so cheap that people use it to heat the footpaths in winter. If you can get energy like that from a guaranteed renewable resource, why bother with anything more expensive, cumbersome and dangerous then? But this is where our capitalist society is so stuffed and morally bankrupt – that it appears to make more economic sense to trade in uranium and engage in nuclear energy production than it does to engage in more salubrious and to my mind, progressive energy production alternatives.
This is only true where nuclear power is cheaper than the alternatives. In Iceland it would not be because Iceland is volcanic and therefore has abundant geo-thermal power. For Australia alternatives will, I am sure, develop in places, probably initially remote ones, where the supply of both coal-based and nuclear power is not competitive. As costs for the alternatives fall to the point that they are cheaper than coal-based or nuclear energy then they will displace coal-based and nuclear power.
This could happen very quickly and I don’t expect that the power companies would resist. All they would do is to buy out the alternative energy suppliers (who will make a tidy profit) and take over their businesses. Such is the way of capitalism.
Touche GregM. I suppose then the way of the future for the supply of energy is a range of alternatives including uranium and coal (hopefully not for long), until the Darwinian forces of the economic market whittles it down to the strongest survivor. However market forces have a funny way of enforcing the least desirable alternatives for communities. Just look at the junk food industry. The other trouble is, while coal and nucular are getting a free leg-up from the Howard government the renewable energies industry is patently not getting so much as a bent cent from them, so it is starting from a position of decided disadvantage.
Although I’m arguing that while nuclear energy might seem the cheapest alternative to economic bean counters in some areas, they will neglect to add on the cost of things like community protection and possible future accidents. For instance the cost to the community of the Chernobyl disaster has been extremely high and it’s been largely the community who has borne it. People in this country scoff at the possibility of another Chernobyl here – Oh this wouldn’t happen in this sophisticated, enlightened country! – but…..Do you know that stored nuclear waste is beginning to seep into the groundwater in France? Then again I saw a picture in a newspaper of a boy in India who lived near a nuclear energy plant – born with three rows of teeth. However Howard doesn’t seem to give a rats arse. He’s all for continuing to ride on Australia’s lucky resources boom and bugger the long term and the social responsibility. So are a lot of other people. That’s free market forces for you.
So somewhere far away in a parallel universe, Bob Brown is absolutely right. But right here he has got to stop acting The Messiah and think of some cunning plan for the renewable energies industry to get their even playing field.
Solar is already cheaper than nuclear. Today.
Otherwise, what Megan said.
Robert Merkel – you completely miss the point of phasing out coal mining. The point is to allow Australia to develop and become dependent on non polluting energy sources. This will (categorically) reduce global emissions.
Nobody is saying this can be achieved in three years – but I’m sure a plan to achieve this could be found in something not too much more than three years.
Bob Brown is spot on with both the politics and the substance. The politics is that there is a huge danger that the ALP and the Liberals are managin to convince both themselves and the voters that we have the problem in hand. Despite having yet to do a single thing about it.
The substance is that the problem is serious – so that demanding the details of work transition schemes up front as a condition to take action is putting the cart before the horse.
No, wbb, I don’t.
If Bob Brown had said “Australia should build no more new coal-fired power stations, and should begin a high-priority program to shut down the ones we currently operate” that would be an entirely defensible policy. Slightly wrong-headed, because geosequestration might be a goer, but defensible.
Shutting down our coal exports, which will achieve nothing, is just idiotic.
Megan, with the greatest respect you’re arguing by anecdote. The EU did a massive study of air pollution that suggests that burning fossil fuels causes 300,000 premature deaths annually in the EU. Right now, not including greenhouse emissions. In Sydney alone, there are roughly 1000 per year. Even a Chernobyl-scale accident every year would represent far less of a risk than what the pollution from our cars and power plants represents right now, thanks very much. While the groundwater contamination is unfortunate, it is utterly trivial by comparison.
Lefty E, would you like to provide some evidence for that statement?
Robert, last year I heard an expert on a panel with Phillip Adams saying that we only extract about 1% of the potential energy from uranium. Processes are being developed to milk it dry. This changes the economics and the availability of supply. He too mentioned seawater. Furthermore he said that fully exploiting the uranium cures the waste problem.
I believe you can’t make bombs out of thorium, which is why it wasn’t developed as a technology in the first place.
The link you provided says that the nearest site to Sydney for geosequestration is Bass Strait. Since it is about 3.5 times the mass of the coal burnt transporting seems a problem. A CO2 gas pipeline perhaps?
I think that if we can do without coal we should for the sake of the planet. I also think we should forego nuclear and leave it to those who really need it if we can get our power from geothermal, solar and wind.
Coal, nucular – I don’t care Robert. Both of them are dirty, dangerous, retrograde technologies belonging to monkeys still crawling out of the primordial slime. It’s about time mankind stopped tinkering with stupid, primitive, destructive technology and started moving forward.
The Chernobyl accident claimed fewer than 50 lives. The worst Nuclear accident in history killed less people than Lightning Strikes, Sharks, Bee Stings and Peanuts.
Far more people have been killed by the sun than have ever been or ever will be killed by nuclear power AND nuclear bombs put together. Should we “move forward” from solar power too?
We can argue the benefits of Brown’s proposal to have a phase out PLAN ready in three years… but before we got on with that, it’d be nice if Mark, and Rob, and Andrew and others added a correction to their posts clarifying that Brown was NOT calling for the industry to be gone in three years, and that claims that he was are based on Murdoch misrepresentations (funny how you’re all linking to the news.com.au version of the story, eh?).
If you want to read Brown’s remarks, I’ve transcribed the relevant part of the interview with Fran Kelly in my post on the subject. (It’s at first a little ambiguous what Brown means, but he clarifies within a few sentences and makes it crystal clear.)
I don’t think a clarification in your posts is too much to ask.
Or you could read this report in The Age:
Or we could just use the opportunity to play up the green freak line which are always hard to resist.
“Mr Brown, do you really want our kids smoking marijuana?”
Right on, Mark. Why just the other day local parents were shocked, yes shocked Mark, when they sprung their kiddies trying to shoot up bong water into veins in their eyeballs.
” I have to say that these remarks by Bob Brown have lessened my respect for him considerably.”
How can we ever thank you, Mark, for drawing these outrageous rantings to the attention of responsible citizens across the length and breadth of Australia. Besides, everybody knows that we don’t need a healthy biosphere to run a successful global economy.
Yobbo, rather deceptive culled reporting. when reading your link you forgot to quote:
It seems even this secondary death toll is under dispute:
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Beestings rarely affect generations yobbo, which nuclear has the potential to do, or arguably already has.
For my 2c. Bob Brown was standing up for what he believes regardless of political cost, its what people expect him to do, and to do otherwise betrays the position he has.
Do we punish politicians for standing up for what they believe or do we reward politicians for simply following polls and chasing the zeitgeist?
One may not agree with your opposition but atleast you can respect them for not “backflipping” for political expediency.
The Australian this morning carries an oped item by Bob Brown. It’s not on the front page like the misreporting of his comments, but it’s something.
An extract:
I hope that this post is primarily due to the misrepresentations by Murdoch and Howard. I can see that you might feel that setting a three year deadline to completely phase out coal would be excessively hasty. However, I do hope that you would support the Greens’ policy of using the next three years to actually formulate a plan to phase out coal. This isn’t a ‘humans versus the environment’ issue – this is a ‘welfare of humanity versus short-term economic gains’ issue.
Climate change is such a serious issue that nothing less than a serious response to it is even vaguely responsible. Globally, we are talking about the livelihoods of millions of people – and the impact will be felt disproportionately by poor communities in the global South. While taking a careful and well-funded approach to the providing for the needs and dignity of coal miners and their communities is important, the impact on them of phasing out coal really does pale into near insignificance in the global context of this issue.
I also cannot see how it is relevant to distinguish between coal that is burned here and coal that we export overseas. It all goes into the same atmosphere. In fact, the health impacts of the coal currently being burned in China are already extremely serious for the populations of many inland cities. If we spent our energy and money on developing and exporting clean technologies (and I am not talking about the ridiculous oxymoron of “clean coal”) then we would be making a positive impact on this issue rather than being such shameful contributors to the problem.
Ross Gittins has some sensible things to say about this issue in the SMH.
I have just two quibbles with the article:
1. There is no threat to the aluminium industry from higher energy prices for the same reason Gittins gives for there being no threat to coal mining from more stringent policy – namely that the raw resource (e.g. bauxite, coal) will remain securely under Australian soil, and capital will have to come here to mine and process it.
2. He doesn’t mention the union’s involvement in greenhouse policymaking and the close fit between its position and Labor’s, which (as I’ve often argued) makes a Tasmanian-style wedging by Howard most unlikely.
See my quote from the CFMEU’s position on climate change here. But brown’s announcement may make electoral sense for the Greens in carving out a political niche. His style has been very sucessfull so far but it won’t take them beyond 10% of the vote.
I agree with Andrew Bartlett:
http://www.andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=1331#comment-41514
If the CFMEU is going to continue to defend its industry regardless, then it is just going to end up – if it already isn’t – on the side of the corporate planetary destroyers and their political masters.
Given that is one of the richest unions in Australia and its members among the highest paid in Australia, it is a wonder that its touted longstanding concern about climate change has not prompted it to investigate, research, gain community support and input and then lead campaigns for regionally located plans for alternative production and employment based on social usefulness and ecological protection.
There are precedents for this, the most famous being that of the Lucas Aerospace workers in Britain who in the early ’70s came up with an alternate corporate plan based on scrapping military production and replacing it with manufacture of socially useful products, using alternative technologies, which would have entailed the loss of no jobs from the 22,000 strong workforce.
I try not to harp too much on that attitude, because I know it doesn’t represent what every Green or green supporter/sympathiser thinks.
But since Greta has said it willingly, it is one of the most anti-human, anti-progress, pro-mediaeval things anyone could say. Perhaps we should start talking about how to reduce living standards in countries where white people don’t live, to save Gaia?
Cristy, at the risk of becoming tedious:
“Brown’s remarks in the interview (which I’d read before posting) are ambiguous, but I’m happy to accept the interpretation.”
Uh, no. One sentence is ambiguous, but Brown immediately clarifies what he’s proposing. There’s no honest way of interpreting his call as AAP and News reported it.
The clarification isn’t that clear to me, Jeremy.
His op/ed in the Australian today makes it clear:
But I honestly don’t think it was all that clear in the Kelly interview, which is all I had to read before the post went up.
Like I said, I’m happy to accept that’s what he meant. The context for my update, though, is the insinuation that I (along with Andrew, John, etc) have been somehow credulous or “duped” by the Murdoch press.
That should hardly be an issue at all, Brian. About 25% of the coal-fired electricity Australia produces is produced in the LaTrobe Valley in Victoria, which is just about adjacent to Bass Strait. As it is produced using brown coal, about the most inefficient coal that can be used to produce electricity, the amount of CO2 it produces is certain to be well above 25% of the CO2 that coal burning for electricity production produces in Australia. If the CO2 that the power stations in the LaTrobe Valley produces can be geosequestered in Bass Strait that would be a huge contribution to reducing Australia’s CO2 emissions. It really doesn’t matter that the CO2 being geosequestered is not from Sydney’s power stations as the issue of CO2 emissions is a global one, not a local one. It’s important to remember that Australia is not just Sydney. There are people living south of the Murray, after all.
Lefty E,
That’s a misrepresentation of the ALP’s position. Current ALP policy is a 60% reduction by 2050. The party platform says we have to recognise the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% of 1990 levels. In Victoria the policy is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050 andincrease low emissions energy generation to 20% by 2020.
And Jeremy, I listed to the interview in question, and I was quite sure at the time that he was talking about phasing out coal exports within one term of government. It was probably the line:
I’m not generally lacking in comprehension, if he was talking about bringing in a plan for banning coal exports it certainly isn’t clear from that quote. And it wasn’t clear listening to him.
Help! My comment disappeared into the spam-eater.
Duly de-spaminated!
The excerpt Rebekka quoted is what had me as well (and Andrew B, I think) reading Brown as saying “let’s phase out coal within three years”.
The argument that was made was not about the ability or right of the impoverished millions in Africa, China, India, Latin America, etc., to have equal access to even the basic necessities of life, which they don’t, let alone be able to live in a way comparable now to the majority of the citizens of the rich world.
The point made was that the source/s of energy available, safe or unsafe, clean or dirty, renewable or non-renewable, utilised in the main by a minority of the world’s population, or freely available to all, is not the be-all-and-end-all of the debate about the ecological crisis. The point was that the debate needs to go radically further: to discuss the limits to growth.
And it is the rich countries, which are so far ahead now and bear a far greater part of the responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, planetary trashing etc., that have a moral responsibility to begin to address this question. To lead on it. Now.
Is this “anti-human� and “pro-medieval�? No, but saying so mimics glib, right-wing stereotyping and dismissal of environmentalism.
“Anti-progress? Yes, if by that is meant anti the unchallenged, unfettered rule of commodity capitalism based on production for exchange value rather than social usefulness and globally destructive exploitation of natural resources and our eco-systems.
The limits to growth are inherent because we live in a material world, one which is showing us just how precise are those limits. And the peoples who suffer, and die, at the greatest rate from the inaction of the richest nations around issues of energy extraction and use, are precisely those impoverished, unhoused, hungry, cold, millions.
How much longer do we allow our governments to ignore their needs?
Cristy, a lot of the discussion about Australia’s coal exports mentions China. In fact China is a minor importer of Australian coal and is a nett exporter of coal itself. Japan is by far the largest importer, at over 100 million tonnes per year, (45% of exports) followed by South Korea, at over 30 million tonnes, then Taiwan and India at about 20 million tonnes each, then China at about 5 million tonnes. One of the reasons for Australia’s coal export success is that its coal has a low sulphur and nitrogen content and is therefore less polluting than coal from alternative sources. China’s coal tends to have high sulphur and nitrogen content, hence the smog that chokes China’s cities. This is a separate issue from CO2 emissions, but there is an arguable case that China would improve the health of its citizens if it imported Australian coal instead of burning its own.
http://www.australiancoal.com.au/exports.htm
Then there is the question of how Japan and South Korea, neither with significant coal reserves of their own and neither particularly close to the Equator (and hence not great candidates for solar energy), would provide for the electricity needs of their respective populations of 120 million and 45 million, if Australia were to cease is coal exports, given that Bob Brown opposes nuclear power and uranium exports as well.
There is also the issue that about 40% of Japan’s coal imports, and 35% of South Korea’s, is coking coal, which is used for such things as steel production and cement manufacture, not electricity generation. If we cease our coal exports should we expect Japan and South Korea to shut down their steel production and associated industries, such as automobile manufacture and ship building, and their construction industry?
I think there is a contradiction in the Greens’ position that neither coal nor nuclear energy is acceptable. Flannery, we know, believes nuclear power will be essential for over-populated areas where solar is insufficient eg North America and Europe.
Japan and Sth Korea may fall into the same category. Hopefully, a sensible hierarchy of values will allow the Greens to continue their push for a stop to coal but to somewhat relent on nuclear.
There is certainly no need for nuclear power within Australia however. Potential energy sources are abundant and could be ramped up to scale in the same time frame that nuclear would require.
Robert Merkel – I wouldn’t write off “clean coal” but I would place covenants of use on our coal exports. Your objection that coal can be sourced from elsewhere is not an argument against discontinuing our unrestricted export of coal.
One of the difficulties with Global Warming is that as a global problem it requires a world made up of independent to actors to take separate but parallel action. Stopping our coal exports is an action that we must take. And which others must take, true. But either way we must take the action. We can’t say we won’t stop until we know for certain that everybody else will too. That is a recipe for inaction. It is the same escape route by which Howard has avoided signing Kyoto.
Yes. From Prof Ian Lowe. And this is before factoring in the real costs of nuclear (which includes waste disposal) http://www.acfonline.org.au/news.asp?news_id=582
Robert, my question to you: why should coal and nuclear keep receving such enormous subsidies (in not having to account for their pollution in their price, but leaving that costs to present and future publics). And should our cost anlysis incldues these? And isnt this, at the very least, an excellent argument for subsides to renewables?
I think there is another aspect of this issue which was implicit in the latter paragraphs of Mark’s post, but which hasn’t really been taken up. This is that, if we accept that major economic and employment adjustment will be necessitated by any effective national or global greenhouse response, it should be a basic Left, and Green, principle that the affected workforces and communities are democratically involved in working out how the adjustment will occur, and are able to bring to the table specific issues such as the particular complications which will be involved in developing alternative employment strategies for workers currently involved in the coal industry. (I say this as a Green committed to the four pillars of Green politics including social and economic justice, and grassroots democracy.)
This is where it is important to look beyond specific details in the CFMEU Mining and Energy Division’s current position which we may disagree with on either principled or practical grounds, to consider the bigger picture and take a positive view of its long-standing and recently reaffirmed willingness to be part of deliberative democratic processes to develop an effective greenhouse response strategy. FWIW, I think the union (and the ALP) are putting far too many eggs in the clean coal basket, but it is neither correct nor fair to characterise the union’s position, as one commented has done, as being unconditional defence of the industry come what may.
You betcha the affected workforce will be involved on the specific issue of the particular complications which will be involved in developing alternative employment strategies for workers currently involved in the coal industry.
And the first question they will ask is, since you are closing down their industry on them, where you will find employment for them at the same rate of remuneration they currently have in the coal industry. They won’t leave the negotiating table until you have given them an answer that satisfies them.
Given the high level of pay that many coal miners earn as highly skilled workers in a highly lucrative capital-intensive industry you won’t get away with offering them low paid jobs in the tourist industry. Some of them make as much as a University professor so I suppose that an an option is to appoint them to those positions as they become vacant.
Lefty E: That’s a one sentence handwave surrounded by irrelevancies.
Bitching about sunk costs from 1962 and earlier is completely irrelevant to 2007.
As for including the costs of pollution, nuclear plants in the United States pay a levy for decommissioning and waste disposal. Not a zot of government money will be spent on the process (excepting disposal from military sites, of course).
Maybe Ian Lowe is right. In which case, the private sector will build solar plants once whomever is in power gets around to putting in an emissions trading scheme and this debate will be moot. But I am not prepared to spend more than we need to on adapting to climate change on completely spurious environmental, risk, and health grounds coming out of a big-g Green movement that (correctly) belts the climate change skeptics upside the head for ignoring expert scientific opinion on climate but are equally happy to distort science and economics on nuclear power.
No, it wasn’t. Greta said nothing about the disribution of resources. What she said was:
Which implies that Greta would be willing to deny the dirt-poor the resources they want and need to do something about their poverty.
The point made was that the source/s of energy available, safe or unsafe, clean or dirty, renewable or non-renewable, utilised in the main by a minority of the world’s population, or freely available to all, is not the be-all-and-end-all of the debate about the ecological crisis. The point was that the debate needs to go radically further: to discuss the limits to growth.
I think the debate needs to be about how poor people can get what they need to not be poor any longer. What do you think the poorest of the world would say about ‘limits of growth’ if they were able to get their hands on cheap, plentiful energy? They would ignore the issue completely, as they build themselves a better world. And good on them.
It is the rich countries, including the Green supporters, who need to get off the necks of the poor and help them to develop their own power. If they do, no doubt the more reactionary of the Green supporters will be calling ’stop!’, on the grounds that the teeming masses can’t be trusted.
That would be hard-left dismissal of environmentalism, actually.
The trouble with criticising me as coming from a right-wing position is that Green ideology is, in itself, right-wing, not left-wing: Being afraid of what people want, and wanting to retard progress in the name of ‘balance’ are right-wing ideas, similar to the distrust of science and democracy that was the Catholic Church’s official ideology for many centuries.
“Anti-progress? Yes, if by that is meant anti the unchallenged, unfettered rule of commodity capitalism based on production for exchange value rather than social usefulness and globally destructive exploitation of natural resources and our eco-systems.
Yes, it is definitely anti-progress to want to move backwards from capitalism to some sort of system where fear of human achievement rules.
You think those people need us to wind industry back? To stop making cheap, effective tools? I disagree.
Anyone who likes the general tone of what I am saying should check out David McMullen’s recent book ‘Bright Future – Abundance and Progress in the 21st Century’. You can download the pdf for free or buy an actual book copy.
http://brightfuture21c.wordpress.com
I admire the CFMEU and its constituent parts, like the former building workers/builders’ labourers unions, and the original, discrete mineworkers’ union. But, I think they need to start looking at alternatives, at possible solutions, for both their members’ sake, as well as broader community and environmental needs. This issue isn’t going to go away.
The CFMEU needs seriously to start looking at possible alternative employment plans and strategies for their members and build alliances that can further that. They would have a lot of powerful friends if they raised it.
As to what wage levels their members will move to in alternative employment, I must say the notion that mining is “highly skilled” and that this is the reason mine workers earn on average around $90,000 a year, is debatable. Hi-tech aided much of it may be, as are lots of jobs in most industries today, but much of it remains predominantly labour intensive work that is no more skilled than factory labour.
Through organisation and class struggle, miners in some countries in the last third of the 20th century were able to fashion an industry that remunerated them at a level far higher than had been the case for centuries and at far better rates than paid most other industrial workers. Apart from strong organisation and struggle, their strong bargaining power was directly related to the wealth their work produces, and the high physical toll and risk involved for the men (mostly) who undertake this work.
As for undertaking other work, and its remuneration today, well, it is a whole new ball game when you move from one industry to another. And that is just a fact. Just ask all those radiologists and IT professionals working as taxi drivers.
Of course, if the CFMEU can phase themselves out and still guarantee comparable wage rates for their current members, not out of bounds, then I would be happy to salute their negotiating skills.
Nicely said. But utterly platitudinous and ignorant of the realities of the developing world. The world’s impoverished are not suffering and dying because of the inaction of the richest nations around issues of energy extraction.
They are suffering and dying because they don’t have access to amenities that we take for granted in the richest nations such as:
- clean potable water, which we get through an elaborate system of dams, aqueducts and pipes.
- sewerage disposal, which we get through an elaborate system of pipes and treatment works.
- Good nutrition, which we get from highly mechanised farming and from an elaborate food distribution system.
- access to effective health-care including hospitals and pharmaceuticals, which we can get because our industrial system gives us the wealth to afford it.
Each of those amenities are available to us because we have developed an energy-rich, and yes energy dependent, economic system.
The world’s impoverished will continue suffering and dying because they do not have what we have. And they know this. Look at China which has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty over the past thirty years through taking the Western path of industrialisation. Vietnam too. Our inaction on issues of energy extraction is irrelevant to them except to the extent that it may be beneficial in that we don’t foist our precious values on them thus stopping them building dams for hydroelectricity or coal, oil and natural gas power stations (all adding to CO2 emissions) and nuclear power stations.
They may pay a price for our inaction on issues of energy extraction in the future but their calculation is that by then they’ll be rich(er) and that it’s better to deal with today’s problems of hunger, disease and destitution by building up their energy use than to worry about its possible consequences in the future.
They are not really concerned about your solicitude for their well-being. They’d much rather you go away and not bother them while they expend energy on building dams for clean water and electricity, pipes for safe water distribution and sewerage disposal and factories so they can build farm machinery and trucks to transport food and make things they can sell in order to afford a decent health system.
Driven a two-hundred ton dumpster loaded with ore up from the bottom of an open-cut mine then, have you? What’s the skill in that. Any bus-driver could do it, I suppose.
I truly suspect that you know absolutely nothing about the mining industry.
The commentary on this thread collectively outlines the major political-economy problems of this century.
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On the one hand we have the impact of human industry on the environment. We can’t ignore this because to do so will cost us in many ways. Apart from the well-touted climate changes, there’s also increased toxicity and depleted resources. Switching to nuclear might solve the coal problem but creates a bigger problem – the use of a mineral based energy source which produces dangerous toxic waste.
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Also there’s the very real issue of economic development. As Greg M correctly points out the ‘third world’ suffers medieval type poverty because of the lack of modern amenities. Providing these amenities has energy costs and this is a problem if we want to reduce CO2 emmissions, reduce toxic waste and moderate resource consumption.
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Their problem is ours. We cannot simply eliminate industries like coal and expect everything to be hunky dory. To do so will produce massive and richocheting unemployment. 20 000 coal miners provide economic stimulus and support for a much larger group of people. Service industries, export dollars, persons dependant on miners incomes etc will all be in the shithouse.
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The concept of a return to agrarian society is fanciful. Even if one disregards the jump in poverty, famine, bad health etc that this entails we simply aren’t equipped for it. Millions of people working in offices, malls, factories etc can’t simply go back to a farm. That’s a kind of work one has to be born into to be physically able to do it. If you don’t believe me try picking fruit for a season.
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So what is to be done?
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When you think about it it really becomes a problem. I’d suggest that the first step in the approach is lay aside ideological prejudices associated with markets and governments. Markets are very efficient at producing stuff and achieve rapid change much faster than public sector initiaves. Governments are necessary for the regulation and moderation of the effects of markets. they can also provide resources for non-profit making endeavours.
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The second thing is that people should start to factor in the environment in their activities. All people, all activities. Corporations, government department, individuals can all make decisions that minimize waste, utilize energy efficient technology (eg LED lights) and eliminate unnecessary squandering of resources. This is not anti-capitalist. Capitalists can be very good at eliminating waste. This modification should be pragmatic not symbolic. The recent switch the lights off in Paris probably used more energy than it saved.
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The other thing that needs to happen is that the environmental movement has to remove its prejudices re. tech solutions to some problems. If massive chemical fertilizers and pesticides are a problem for example, genetic modification might be the solution. There are legitimate criticisms of GM but how one avoids it if agricultural chemistry is bad is unknown to me. Organic farming’s nice but it won’t feed billions.
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Likewise nuclear power. If renewable energy sources are not currently up to speed we may have no other choice. I don’t know if that’s true because the debate is coloured by ideological prejudice and vested interest and I’m no scientist.
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But it seems to me that if we need to phase out fossil fuels and nuclear is our only option we have to take it. That said we should realise that nuke is dangerous and non-renewable. We’ve got to put resources behind research into renewable and clean energy sources and energy efficiency. This needs to be the sci-tech mission of the early 21 century.
You really do know nothing about the mining industry at all.
Australia’s miners wages grew because, post WW2, as first Japan, then Korea (except for the crazy bit in the north) then Taiwan industrialised their demand for raw materials which Australia has in abundance soared, making it worthwhile for capitalists to invest in capital-intensive mining techniques which reduced the cost per unit of production of labour but which because it required highly skilled operators to keep the expensive machinery operating as much as possible in order to maximize return on investment were prepared to pay a premium to attract and hold the labour it wanted. The physical toll is less than than applied prior to that capital investment (there’s not much pick and shovel work in a coal mine these days) and the risks involved in mining are a great deal less than they were prior to that capital investment. That is not to disparage the CFMEU. Their vigilance and activism has assisted greatly in improving and maintaining improvements in safety in the mining industry.
Gregm your abstract portrait of the state of poor countries, and the reasons why they are so, is ahistoric and borderline racist in implying they simply haven’t had the wit, over so many centuries of human settlement and economic development, to develop systems that can provide clean potable water, healthy, varied diet, health care systems, etc.
Uneven development aside, your account totally ignores the role of imperialism in distorting and wrecking the economies of the poor nations in previous centuries, including, but not exclusively, those countries targetted as part of the Cold War, such as China and Vietnam.
So you think driving a machine that lifts heavy weights, is a skill? Well, you would, wouldn’t you.
Have you been a miner, or a female process worker, or a nurse or a builder’s labourer? Your discounting of the role of unionism is a dead give-away. Your spin is that of a mining manager.
You have zero credibility.
GregM I’m well aware that people outside Sydney can fall off the edge. The linked article was concerned about Sydney’s bad pollution, but in fact that is probably not from coal.
A real problem with geosequestration is that it can’t be retrofitted as far as I know.
I think Brown has got his strategies wrong. First we should plan to clean up our act here in Oz. We should be aiming to decarbonise our electricity grid as a high priority, but as part of our global warming/climate change strategy. Geosequestration may be part of it, but I’d see the emphasis on developing energy alternatives.
Policy and carbon trading should be aimed, as Gittins said, to internalise the social costs of coal.
What’s happening in India and China is scary beyond belief. Flannery in his The Weather Makers said that together from 2000 to 2030 they would build 1400 coal-fired power stations. They seem to be on target, maybe ahead.
The relevant Indian minister said recently that they had a the right to pollute in order to grow, and they would take no notice of the advanced countries until they had real runs on the board in reducing emissions. He has a point. I heard recently that in Europe exemptions to carbon trading are often given to projects deemed important economically.
But the World Trade organisation, surely one of the most hypocritical organisations on earth, needs to take climate change on board. ‘Free’ traders always tell us that we should accept the world as we find it. Labour conditions and environmental impacts are the business of nation states.
But this emission thing doesn’t stay over there.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Point me out one thing in what GregM has said that implies that global poverty is the fault of the poor.
I will go further than he has, and explicitly say that this poverty is the fault of rich countries.
What poor countries need is more economic and industrial development, not less. They need the resources of rich countries to help them do that.
The answer to imperialism is not a pseudo-left retreat from progress and development – the answer is to force progress and development to happen, even where it doesn’t suit the imperialists.
There’s a book Maps of Time that demonstrates how technological innovation is sparked off and diseminated throughout history. The process often takes centuries. Europeans developed agriculture some centuries after the Middle East for example. The reason had nothing to do with race and everything to do with time.
Greg M might underestimate the role of unfair trading practices, imperialism and neo-imperialism in keeping certain regions backward but I think it’s unfair to infer racism.
Mark – “But I honestly don’t think it was all that clear in the Kelly interview, which is all I had to read before the post went up.”
Rebekka – “I’m not generally lacking in comprehension, if he was talking about bringing in a plan for banning coal exports it certainly isn’t clear from that quote. And it wasn’t clear listening to him.”
Please, both of you, read the transcribed remarks from that interview at my post (they’re in two parts). I agree that the sentence you’re quoting is ambiguous. But he clarifies it a few sentences later with “let’s within three years have a working plan to remove coal exports and diminish the burning of coal in this country and replace it with clean, safe renewable energy”.
If anyone was in doubt after the “suddenly ban coal exports” sentence you quote, they could only have been so for about ninety seconds before he realised that it was ambiguous and restated his position as described. I don’t see how you can have heard the interview and thought he was proposing a ban within three years. Fran Kelly even asked him – “within three years, though?” and he explained what he meant. I’m at a loss as to how anyone can honestly have come to the News Ltd “interpretation” after hearing the whole interview.
Geosequestration is fraught with potential problems like co2 leakage back into the atmosphere, acidification of water supplies leading to leaching of mineral contaminants and overall it is a completely unknown quantity. No doubt it may be part of an overall strategy but who can doubt that the primary motivation seems to be to save the coal fired power generators first and address emissions next – otherwise why would they have allowed David Mills’ solar technology to defect to the US without (apparently) even knowing it existed. The Greens are doing exactly what they should be doing- pushing the agenda toward actual emissions reductions, not half-arsed compromises with the industry lobby.
Jeremy, a lot of people seem to have, nevertheless. I listened to the interview before I clicked on any news stories. The second comment still doesn’t seem to me to clarify it sufficiently. But, anyway, let’s move on.
The reason they haven’t developed the systems to provide clean potable water etc is that they haven’t industrialised yet. The same was true of Europe even as recently as 150 years ago. It’s not a factor of them not having the wit, and it’s not a racial thing, its a factor of them not, up until now, adopting the appropriate economic model and having access to the appropriate technology. It’s not a European thing. Japan and Korea and Taiwan and increasingly China and Vietnam are demonstrating the value of having the right economic model. Your description of my comment as borderline racist is therefore an ignorant ad-hominem attack.
China is a interesting case study in de-industrialisation in the Ming period before there was any Western imperialism. On the other hand Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 40s certainly was destructive of China’s economy. However you can hardly blame the Cold War for the lunacy of the Great Leap Forward where Chinese farmers were encouraged to throw their perfectly good agricultural implements into blast-furnaces, reducing them to pig-iron in order to increase China’s iron production statistics. Then look at what happened Mao died. Deng came to power. He could at last adopt rational economic policies and so he did with his slogan “To Get Rich is Glorious” and China has not looked back. Same for Vietnam. The French exploited them mercilessly but left them with a pretty decent infrastructure, then 25 years of warfare didn’t help. But neither did the Soviet style economic policy rigidly applied by them after the war had ended. It sent food production plummeting and nearly had the ever-loyal north of the country in open revolt. Then, realising the madness of this, in 1986 they introduced Doi Moi, and with it the beginnings of a market based economy and after a few false steps they haven’t looked back. India after Independence, introduced a socialist-inspired economic system giving them a miserable rate of economic growth for forty years. Then with the BJP in power in the late 1980s a market-based economy was introduced. India’s economic growth rate has soared. It hasn’t looked back.
If you actually knew what driving one of those 200 tonne trucks full of ore up an open-cut pit involved you would not have made that uninformed comment.
I have been a builder’s labourer but never a mining manager. I have not discounted the role of unionism. Its role is distributive not a wealth-creation role. That as not an unimportant role as redistribution of wealth is important to the proper functioning of labour markets. However unions can only distribute what wealth has been created and that wealth comes from trade and exchange in a market system and from the application of capital to create wealth. If you are not aware of that then you are as competely ignorant of labour economics as you are of the mining industry. Having zero credibility with you fazes me not in the slightest.
That’s true however..
…surely redistribution of wealth is important because everyone deserves a share in the material security they’re helping to create. Or is that what you mean by “proper functioning of labour markets.”
>
Y’see why people get pissed off with economic rationalism?
Not really Robert. Carbon pollution levels today set the climate pattern in train for the next thirty years.
You cant have a sensible debate about the relative costs of power alternatives without factoring those costs in – and I dont see coal paying their way. And its probably time to get used to the fact the public just dont want nuclear, and its by no means a superior economic argument to renewables in any case.
Bottom line is: there’s an implacable logic to a massive increase in subsidies to renewables. No other power source pays their own way – why hobble the one that will save our butts with some wholly inconsistent “no subsidy” position?
Yes, it’s partly that Adrien, because the market system doesn’t work properly if it does not share the benefits fairly, but it’s also that it doesn’t work properly if it doesn’t place the best people (the most skilled etc) in positions to improve productivity and therefore increase wealth.
I can understand why you might feel pissed off with economic rationalism but consider the case of a worker, say the 200 tonne truck-driver I have mentioned before. He or she works their butts off to do their jobs and make big bucks. It doesn’t end there. They then spend their money on things that are important to them and often that’s on something like an investment property somewhere which creates work and wealth for someone else, and of cause they pay more taxes which funds benefits for everyone else and so it goes. It creates a virtuous cycle.
Brian,
one of contributing polluters of CO2 emissions are ‘out of control’ coal fires either in mines, or in naturally occurring seams.
Estimates say between 100-200 million tons of coal is burnt in these out-of-control fires, in China every year – and this figure doesn’t include coal fires in India, Indonesia, and the US etc. (our total coal export is 235 mil. tons.)
It is estimated that these fires emit up to 3% of global CO2 emissions (!!) or as much as all cars and light trucks in the USA.
There is a coal fire, which has been burning in Pennsylvania for 43 years. Scientists estimate that Australia’s Burning Mountain, the oldest known coal fire, has burned for 6,000 years. http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/issues/2005/may/firehole.php
These fires are very difficult to extinguish – as fires burning in populated areas in the US – are testament to, and there has been to date, very little Govt. or scientific funding to deal with these fires.
It seems crazy, that there isnt a major global response to deal with this issue.
FYI – a sino-german initiative: http://www.coalfire.caf.dlr.de/intro_en.html
http://www.coalfire.caf.dlr.de/projectareas/world_wide_distribution_en.html
awaiting moderation…..
hhm, must have been the 3 x links?
Yep!
thanks kim – excellent service. as usual.
Pleasure, jo
jo, thanks. We learn something every day.
GregM, your neat neoliberal textbook economics make it all sound so simple. What a pity the real world doesn’t work like that.
To start with miners in the coal industry. Turnover is quite high among miners, and quite a bit of it is involuntary because of injuries. Deaths are now relatively rare in coal mines, but injuries are frequent. Because of that, mining is mostly a young man’s industry. Miners, the ones who don’t suffer a career-ending back injury, make a lot of money in a few years and then move on to other jobs or buy farms, small businesses, etc.
As for skills. There are some skills in many jobs these days. If someone sat you down at a telecoms pit in any suburb, you probably wouldn’t be able to make much sense of all those wires, etc and if you tried you’d quickly stuff up the local telecoms network (although not as much as the neoliberal economic model has stuffed up the world). So yes, a miner using a haulpack or a dragline in an open cut has some skills, so do many workers. Your point is?
Oh yes, that’s right, industrial democracy. The last I heard, workplace democracy wasn’t a particularly conspicuous feature of the neoliberal model. I’ve read a fair bit about the Howard industrial laws and I must have missed the bit about workplace democracy.
Coming back to the coal industry, I don’t remember any consultation of the workforce when most of the Illawarra coalfield was closed down because the mining companies could get coal cheaper from open cuts in the Hunter Valley and central Queensland. What makes you think miners are ever consulted when mines are closed?
Most of the coal mines now operating in NSW will be exhausted within 15-20 years. Do the mining companies consult the dragline operators and haulpack drivers before they declare the remaining reserves in a mine uneconomic and move on? I haven’t heard of any cases of that.
As for the rest of the world lifting itself out of poverty by adopting the neoliberal model, for the past 20-odd years the neoliberal model has been dominant, and most of the underdeveloped countries have been going backwards in that time, and that’s leaving aside the large underclass that has developed in the advanced countries at the same time, particularly the US.
On China, your ignorance defies belief. Have you ever heard of the iron rice bowl, and can you explain what happened to that when China adopted neoliberal economics? Your economics are pure voodoo, Greggy.
Just a brief rejoinder to GregM’s response to my last comment. As Robert Merkel and I agreed on another thread, and as Ross Gittins explained in the article I linked to, ultimately the fate of Australia’s coal industry and all who sail in her will be determined by what the buyers of our coal exports decide to do to reduce their emissions. This has been well recognised by the union and the relevant industry bodies since about 1990.
Also:
Until relatively recently this statement was unproblematically true. However, as I explained here, the inaction of the richest nations is now emerging as a significant reason why the world’s impoverished are suffering and dying. “An elaborate system of dams, aqueducts and pipes” is not worth a pinch of shit if the rain doesn’t come (as inhabitants of Australia’s major cities are well aware).
It is ironic how neo-liberals deny limits to growth in the ecological sense yet seek to limit the growth of their economic rivals. China, India and Vietnam are all perfect examples of countries whose economies were deliberately undermined and wrecked by imperialism in recent centuries. They are all still recovering.
By the end of the 19th century, China was effectively on the way to territorial dismemberment and economic vassalage—the fate of India’s rulers that had played out much earlier.
In 1700, India and China accounted for 47% of world gross domestic product while Western Europe’s share was a mere 26%. By 1870, the Asian countries had slumped to a combined 29% of world GDP and Western Europe leaped to 42%. The East India Company, which was a direct agent of the British state, the first imperial corporation, was the primary device for this reversal.
Tens of millions of people in China, Vietnam and India died from these policies and continue to do so today: from Paraguay, to Africa, to the Pacific, back to India today, all places where inequality is massively increasing and starvation occurring in places where it had been thought eliminated. And what is responsible: neo-liberalism, the policies of the World Bank, the IMF and compliant or otherwise imperialist-dominated undemocratic national political regimes defending a system based on enriching a minority and impoverishing the majority and trashing a finite environment in the process.
Abuse of market power, buying cheap and selling dear, corporate greed, the elimination of competition, the destruction of traditional economies (in what could not, at one time, eg. China, India, Vietnam be called the poor or developing world), none of these devices is new and continue today on a world scale.
Such economic policies, backed by imperialist nations such as Australia and the US, guarantee that many of the world’s poorest countries will never, ever, achieve anything like the industrialisation that rich countries and their citizens enjoy.
Countries which have suffered from imperialism are not going to accept, or even listen to, Western greens who try to hobble their progress by talking about “limits to growth.”
When those countries get more of their rightful power back, they will grow as quickly as they can.
I’d like a few references to demonstrate that starvation and inequality are increasing, if you have them.
Fair enough, but who (apart from assorted climate change denialists, and the ratty’s cohorts) is putting such arguments ? Certainly not the Greens.
FWIW, my understanding of the “green” position is the exact opposite –
i.e. that the rich and developed nations should be both limiting (their) growth, and shifting to the development and use of alternate energy sources which do not further threaten the biosphere (as they are most able to “afford” such a transition) – concomitant benefits to the development of such technologies would, in turn, provide exports to the “developing countries”, so that they may continue to develop without having to further pollute our (only) world.
The world/biosphere/planet is finite – so it follows that any notions of “unlimited growth” (such as current economic models are based upon) are clearly nonsense, as we WILL be limited in our expansion, either by free will (and with some controls) or by catastrophe.
Pterosaur: Greta, who sounds like a green sympathiser, said:
Which sounds to me like she would be willing to deny economic growth to poor countries on the grounds that it is not good for the planet.
Poor countries are going to develop with no regard whatsoever for Western Green opinions about clean or dirty energy. If you can provide them with clean efficient and effective tech, all well and good, but if you can’t, won’t or don’t, then poor countries will push on with whatever seems to be in their best interests, no matter how dirty the tech is.
If that were to happen, Western Greens would need to decide if the development of poor countries is less or more important than ecological damage.
I’m already on the side of the poor countries.
David, why not respond to Pterosaur’s argument rather than what you perceive Greta’s position to be.
Also, for the reasons I linked to in my last comment, if one is in favour of the development of poor countries one has to be concerned about ecological damage such as that caused by climate change (largely due to the behaviour of the wealthy countries) which is increasingly inhibiting the development of poor countries at the most basic level.
To follow up Paul’s comment, this graph has been designed to show where the warming has been in the last 30 years. In the future, we are told, it will rain less in low latitude temperate zones and there will be significant problems of freshwater availability to those regions depending on glacial meltwater, including China, India and around to Turkey, plus the Andes.
The poor are also affected differentially in many other ways, including the vulnerability of their infrastructure to extrme weather events.
I’ve now put up for your contemplation and consideration a post on the IPCC document approved in Paris recently.
DJ, your arguments , straw men and all, are pretty futile because they conveniently ignore the central point made consistently that the idea of unlimited growth in a world of finite resources is pure fantasy. If you therefore accept that there must be some limit to growth for the planet to survive, the question becomes how best we can do this for the benefit of everybody.
Your simplistic characterisation of opponents as being against ‘poor’ countries and you being for them is as juvenile as it is unhelpful. What good is unbridled economic growth going to be to these countries if large parts are under water or otherwise adversely affected by climate change?
Maybe you need to visit some of these countries, and you may come to realise that the situation is far more complex and the attitude to economic growth within many of them far more ambiguous that you acknowledge in your simplistic world view.
I did. Pterosaur asserts that Western countries should adopt a particular course of action – making clean tech available to poor countries.
I said that if Green sympathisers can’t, won’t or don’t get Western countries to adopt that course of action, then poor countries will ignore potential ecological damage and develop anyway.
Green sympathisers will then need to decide if they think that this sort of development would be disastrous or not, and whether they should stop it or not.
If Green sympathisers decided to stop that sort of development, and were able to do so, then they would be the new imperialists.
This argument is inherent in Greta’s obvious distrust of the people of the world.
Who is ‘we’? Who gets to decide how development should be apportioned? You and other rich people in Western countries, or poor people in poor countries?
It’s not me you have to convince. It’s the people in those countries who are going to push ahead with economic development, whether you like it or not. And good luck to them.
David, Greta is right. And your alleged concern for the majority of the world’s population is belied by your arguments effectively supporting, by not recognising and opposing, the neo-liberalism that is sentencing them to death.
And since you asked, you could start with Indian eco-feminist, anti-globalisation activists and writers, such as Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva. But there are countless people, like them, and me, saying the same thing. How about the UN for starters?
and here
Perhaps I didn’t make it clear enough earlier.
Why do you presume to speak for entire populations of what you call ‘poor’ countries? Doesn’t that strike you as a touch arrogant?
I regularly visit such countries, and I can tell you that the attitudes of many are not as clear cut and simplistic as you would have us believe. A cursory viewing of Indonesian TV and conversations with locals, for example, reveals that there is a widespread concern of the effects of unbridled economic growth and the effects of climate change. People don’t automatically want the kind of economic growth that we take for granted because many can see the conequences of such growth.
Other factors such as the importance of religion further increase the complexity of the situation.
DJ, with reference to your post on 13 February 2007 at 11:58 am,
your “logic” fails, it seems to me on the “chaining of IF’s” – I was taught (many years ago), that one such was possible, two, dodgy at best, and three amounted to fantasy.
However, that aside – why persist in the (false) dichotomies that you draw e.g.
rather than address the issues raised ?
You have drawn these dichotomies, and then expect others to adhere to them in order to support your viewpoints – this cannot be considered as argument, but rather as rhetorical flourish,
and without substance.
Much like the numbers of posters who have persisted with the false assertions which lay (lie) at the basis of Mark’s original post, IMHO, which seem to be more aimed at discrediting green ideas and philosophies than actually dealing with the facts of the statement made by Bob Brown.
BTW, I didn’t assert anything in my earlier post – I pointed out to you that “my understanding of the “greenâ€? position is the exact opposite…….” to the assertion that you made in your earlier post that
Yep, supporter of neo-liberalism, that’s me. My payment (in gold – it’s such an unstable world) from the neo-liberal think tanks is just about to arrive. They particularly like the way I accused rich countries of ’stepping on the necks’ of poor countries. That’s exactly what the neo-liberals want to hear.
I hope the poor and working people of India throw out the rotten moneylenders and the millers who monopolise the grain mills and charge for their use, destroy the whole system that keeps them poor, and set up one that is run for their benefit – one that will industrialise rapidly so that people are no longer poor there.
Do you want that?
Or do you think that moneylenders and millers are part of “a fragile, interdependent, historically complex societ[y]” that deserves to be preserved?
I’m not speaking for them – I’m not trying to tell them what to do. I’m describing what I think they will do.
When you have a statistically valid study of people’s opinons in poor countries, as opposed to your own impressions, I’ll be ready to listen. Until then, I will assume that the vast majority of people in poor countries want to develop and get richer.
Pterosaur, since you can only handle one ‘if’, here is a question that only has one:
If poor people in poor countries demand the right to develop their industry in ways of which you disapprove, what will you do?
You can call this a ‘false dichotomy’ all you like, but the point remains that green ideology stands against the sort of industrial development that poor people need to get rich.
DJ – your assertion
is rubbish !
Green philosophy and practice does not stand for anything like that, despite the logical contortions you attempt in order to support your view.
Please refer to my earlier post of 13 February 2007 at 11:47 am for further clarification.
BTW, if you knew anything about probability theory (or practice) you would understand the “if limitation” which has universal application.
Ed, one of the things I find on threads about climate change is the amazing level of ignorance combined with self-righteous arrogance of many, not all, of the Green interlocutors.
You are a case in point. Your assertion above provides no evidence, except some comment about the iron ricebowl and a question, which pre-suppposes its own answer (something truly evil we are left to guess) about what happened when China adopted neoliberal economics.
First to the iron ricebowl. Yes I know about it. It had a hole in it. A very large hole. You apparently do not know this. Why am I not surprised?
During the period of the iron ricebowl China experienced the greatest famine the world has ever known. Between 1958 and 1961 between 20 and 43 million people starved to death. The cause of this was not the weather for conditions were not particularly arduous for agriculture. Its cause was, rather, the economic policies adopted by the Chinese communist party under Mao Zedong in the Great Leap Forward (about which your ignorance defies belief) which devastated the economy and left countless millions starving and as I mentioned tens of millions dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequences
Nevertheless, no cloud is without a silver lining- for someone. And in this case that someone was Australian wheat farmers for, from the 1960s, they made a nice little earner out of exporting wheat to China (their principal export market for many years) which could not feed itself, because the government of which knew from the history of China what happened to dynasties that could not feed the people.
And what happened (gasp, shock, horror) when China introduced neo-liberal policies? Well they first introduced them in the agriculture sector, dismantling Mao’s commune system, and introducing the “responsibility” system and lo and behold agricultural production has soared. They now have more food to eat than they’ve ever had. Wheat production has risen by 369%, rice production by 177%, fresh vegetable production by 404% and fruit production by 1060% per capita, http://historylink101.com/lessons/farm-city/per_capita.htm despite the population doubling over forty years and the agricultural workforce falling from 71% of the population to 50% as the rural population headed off to new jobs in the cities created by neo-liberal policies. Thanks to those neo-liberal reforms that you deride the Chinese people have never eaten better.
It has also reduced absolute poverty in China from 53% of the population in 1981 to 8% in 2001. Not a bad achievement for neo-liberalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
Learn something of history before you presume to comment on what you suppose is the ignorance of others about it. And look at what history teaches us about the effect of different economic policies on populations before you presume to comment on whether an economic policy is voodoo or not.
Help, my comment iscaught in the spaminator. Too many links
DJ – the Kyoto Protocol which is the best eg of “Green ideology” we have yet to achieve, specifically gave less industrialises countries certain exemptions out of respect for their lesser material wealth. And this was why selfish pricks like Howard and Bush refused to have a bar of it.
It’s there now, GregM.
And? mines all have an economic life. As some come to their end others open up. The workforce moves on. You may call this neo-liberal economics. Others call it common sense.
However you wouldn’t mind supplying a link to prove your unsupported assertion, would you? You have got something of a credibility problem after your China comments.
That merely demonstrates that you are ignorant of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission’s TCR Test Case decision of 1984. That decision precisely required employers to consult with unions before declaring redundancies. You’ll find that a union like the CFMEU would know just as well as any mine owner when a mine would become economically exhausted. They would not be doing their job if they didn’t.
GregM, I think you’ll find that the TCR decision no longer applies – swept away by WorkChoices. The provisions could still be written into certified agreements but it’s no longer the award standard. Hence the problem the Tristar workers had – after their EBA expires, they now go back to minimal redundancy provisions applicable under a stripped down award. I haven’t checked this, but I’m about 90% sure. But open to being corrected if someone knows or wants to wade through the 600 pages of the WRA.
on the iron rice bowl and China yesterday and today – interesting, rather more detailed accounts than gregm’s.
and here
http://www.jubileeresearch.org/news/china090703.htm – link that didn’t work, sorry,
and the other link on the iron rice bowl and famines – seems to have disappeared so posting again,
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1621/16210150.htm
Mark, being outside the country for the last few years when Workchoices was introduced I have not read the legislation and have deliberately chosen not to comment on threads where it has been discussed. However if it has got rid of the TCR provisions then it is sad legislation. The TCR requirements were not onerous and provided a template for employers to consult with unions and employees on making transitions, whether to new technology or to adjust to new economic conditions, which employers should have been doing anyway in their own interests as well as those of their employees.
It seems that Howard’s legislation has taken us back to Dickensian times, which we can ill-afford.
“Consultation” with Australian unions about the introduction of new technology, redundancy, or other major employer-led changes from the Hawke years onwards was usually only ever just that. Despite union opposition, the employers just went ahead and did what they wanted. It is not as if workers have ever had a vote on these matters. It was never workplace or industrial democracy – a complete misnomer.
I worked in a federal government workplace in the early 80s that was selected by the ALP government as a national show case for industrial democracy and affirmative action. The place was closed down several years later throwing thousands of people out of work.
The only way unions have ever been able to oppose redundancies or entire closures has been by taking industrial action, which in my personal experience in a variety of industries and workplaces, including metal manufacturing, clerical work and the state and federal public service, and from labour movement observation, the unions were defeated in close to 100 per cent of cases.
Greta, thanks for the links. I enjoyed reading both of the documents. The second, of course, has little to do with the “iron ricebowl”, a policy that Deng sought to dismantle after taking power in 1978, but it is a good account of the sound policies adopted by the Chinese leadership since he came to power, avoiding IMF type “shock-therapy” approaches while introducing the market based economic practices that are the basis of China’s rise to prosperity. It is also good at covering the social and dislocation problems that arise where any economy is in transition and the need for the Chinese government to be vigilant in addressing them.
The first paper is a hoot. The writer concedes (one thinks with as about as much happiness as he would have at having all of his teeth pulled) that:
then goes on to query whether this radical drop in food supply resulted in a famine in China.
Anybody familiar with China’s historical issue of the chronic tight balance between China’s food needs and its food supply would have to answer “Yes, if you cut the food supply of a country with chronic food shortages by 25% for two years running there will be a famine”. A simple proposition really.
However the admirable Utsa Patnaik tries, in the face of all the evidence, to argue the contrary. Conceding that in 1960 the mortality rate increased by 10.8 per thousand (which translates into 6.5 million extra deaths in China’s then population of around 600 million) but not mentioning what the death rate was in 1961 when the famine continued- leaving one to wonder whether the death rate may have fallen back to normal in that following year despite the Chinese rural population being debilitated from the two previous years of famine- he argues that by comparison to India at the time this was not too bad at all. India as a point of comparison? India’s socialist and autakic economic policies at the time, as they affected the farming sector, were just as likely to achieve unfavourable outcomes as China’s. Also, rather naughtily, he does not mention that the death rate increase that he selectively quotes was the adult death rate, not that of children, and we all know who dies off first in a famine.
Spurious, self-serving nonsense, but a fun read. Thanks for sharing it.
So you are saying, are you gregm, that the Chinese government DELIBERATELY cut food production? Wow. That’s an innovative spin. Why on earth would they do that? Funny what governments will do, in your contextless, motiveless (or rather evil motives rule ok) world.
You are consistently a very unreliable interpreter of actual history, existing economics. What next I wonder?
I take it that this federal government workplace was taxpayer funded. The federal government has a responsibility to the taxpayers before it has a responsibility to those who draw a wage from those taxpayers. If the government decided that the service being provided was no longer needed or could be better delivered otherwise I can’t see a problem in it closing what is then clearly a redundant agency. What’s it supposed to do? Keep paying you until retirement for work it doesn’t need you to do?
Should that surprise you? If employers want to shut down a business then the reason will usually be an economic one driven by their competitive place in the market. If unions take industrial action that just makes them less competitive and all the more eager to shut down.
It shut down because it was cheaper to pay Third World labour to do our work. In fact, you could say the federal ALP government trailblazed a production decision increasingly taken by private industry today. I think it is called neo-liberalism.
Since I have been accused of being a neo-liberal, at least in my economics, on this thread I will have to respond to that. Nowhere have I argued to seek to limit the growth of emerging countries. Precisely the opposite. I have argued to support the growth of China, Vietnam and India and support the economic growth of every country to bring their people out of poverty. Where you have got the idea that neo-liberals seek to limit economic growth for anyone I cannot fathom. Greens seek to do it. Protectionists seek to do it, but neo-liberals do not.
Give us a break. South Korea suffered from Japanese imperialism and then a devastating war. Taiwan was a Japanese colony from the late nineteenth century. Japan was laid waste by the American firebombing of its cities in the late stages of WW2, and was under American occupation and rule until 1951. They all achieved their independence at about the same time as, or later than China, India and Vietnam- nearly sixty years ago. They all adopted rational economic policies from an early stage and have prospered mightily. And of China, Vietnam and India? What they have in common is that each of them, upon independence adopted irrational economic policies and each of them languished until each of them, China in 1978, Vietnam in 1986 and India in 1991, saw the folly of their ways and adopted rational economic policies, from which time they began to prosper. Sixty years after imperialism has ended is more than enough time for countries to get their house in order, adopt rational economic policies and stop blaming others for what were their own self-inflicted mistakes.
Do you understand that GDP is not a fixed thing but generally grows over time. The fact that Europe’s share of world GDP had risen from 26% to 42% because of high economic growth and therefore expanded the amount of world GDP the was does not mean that the actual GDP of China and India had declined but that rather that China and India’s economic growth had stagnated or grown more slowly, thus, after a hundred and seventy years, leaving them no less rich than they were but with a smaller proportion of the world’s GDP. What the figures you quote are testimony to is the wisdom of European countries in adopting rational economic policies which gave them high economic growth from an early time. Happily the governments of China and India have now, belatedly started to adopt rational economic policies and have, as a result, seen their economic growth rates soar.
Actually the East India Company wasn’t a direct agent of the British state. It was a privately owned company and a direct agent of its shareholders.
Tens of millions of Chinese, Vietnamese and Indians died from their governments adopting irrational economic policies and hundreds of millions have been raised from the utter destitution brought about by those policies when their governments saw the light and introduced neo-liberal economic policies.
China, India and Vietnam have seen food production, and with it the well-being of their people, burgeon since they adopted rational neo-liberal economic policies. The scorecard’s in on that one. The GDPs of China, India and Vietnam are all projected to grow by 9.5% this year.
I’m not a fan of the World Bank and the IMF, which I think botched the 1997 Asian economic crisis totally, so I’ll pass on commenting on that. I point out however that China, India and Vietnam are all members of the IMF and the World Bank. Are they the imperialist-dominated undemocratic national political regimes that you are referring to?
You do not think that the creation of a state monopoly on the market, which is the basis of socialism is an abuse of market power? It certainly eliminates competition and Mao’s Great Leap Forward did a thorough job in destroying China’s economy, just as his Cultural Revolution did a thorough job of destroying Chinese traditional society.
Well, the economic policies backed by the imperialist nations such as Australia and the US have seen the greatest recorded rise in prosperity over a short time occur in China, with Vietnam and India hot on its heels. There must be some good in neo-liberal economics for that to happen.
Not deliberately Karen, which you would know, if your had read my previous posts referring to the Great Leap Forward. I am sure that Mao’s intentions with the Great Leap Forward, which Deng vigorously opposed for its economic madness, were benign though totally misconceived, for Mao was an economic illiterate, but its consequence was to cut the food supply of China by 25%.
Just proves how important it is to keep economic policy in safe hands.
Yes, it is neo-liberalism. Surely you could not be opposed to it. For here the government, by providing employment in the Third World, has given some people in the Third World the opportunity to share in the benefits of First World prosperity and increase their economic wellbeing while saving dollars for the taxpayer and freeing up redundant Australian workers to find employment elsewhere in the Australian economy where they are more needed. It’s always nice to see stories where Third World countries benefit from neo-liberalism. To think that a few less people go hungry is a happy thought.
The work wasn’t outsourced to Cambodia by any chance, was it?
That’s where I am living and I do like to see the Cambodians do well.
Excellent career move gregm. Cambodia today is a magnet for Western carpetbaggers.
greg m wrote:
Thank you for proving our points so spectacularly, gregm.
Indeed, why have unions, by your argument? Everything built by human beings we see around us and enjoy, built by human labour, housing, railways, bridges, electricity, social services, such as provision of public education and healthcare, comes from the labor of workers, produced by workers, using their collective skill, creativity and ingenuity for the benefit of society.
But you say, gregm, these people, us, the majority, should we have no meaninful rights, no voice, no veto power, and capital must be allowed to do what it must to realise, and appropriate, for the benefit and enrichment of a minority, the wealth we produce.
Gregm wrote;
Gosh, you’re not a closet fellow traveller are you gregm? I mean “the safe hands” you are referring to in China are the exact same Stalinist centralised bureaucratic regime responsible for both things: your “illiterate” (revealing descriptor) and your sensible, positive economic policies today. Now, How Can This Be maestro?
I think there is some deliberate misunderstanding going on here .
Greta , you have all my all sympathy in your struggle against reality but to call the current technocrats and corrupt wheeler dealers in Beijing the same as Mao (when he was the one and only ruler in the 50’s and 60’s in China )is nothing but rubbish.
Good luck pursuing that elusive utopia by the way .
Quite right, Greta and I avoid them like the plague. You really wouldn’t believe the number of Western NGO types living high on the hog as they dispense “technical guidance” to Khmers on “development” which has had exactly no visible benefit to the Khmers at all. The Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Sen, not a lovely character but a very astute one, has complained that for all of the US$600 million foreign aid (about 15% of its GDP) Cambodia gets each year, most of it ends up in the pockets of those carpetbaggers without the purported skills transfer to Cambodians ever taking place and without visible benefit to Cambodians.
The days of the carpetbaggers may be coming to an end, however, as last year China gave Cambodia a US$600 million no-strings-attached foreign aid grant so Hun Seen may see that as an opportunity to see the back of the Western NGO do-gooders. Not that that will do any good to the ordinary Cambodians though, as its pretty evident that China intends to treat Cambodia as an economic colony providing raw materials to fuel China’s industry.
Meanwhile the Cambodian economy is powering along (last year it was said to have grown by 13.4%) on its textile exports and its tourist industry centred around the temples of Angkor.
You should visit it some time. Given your professed concern for the poor of the third world and your Green convictions I am sure that I could arrange you a three month home-stay in a Khmer village. I am sure that you would enjoy the early nights as the electric generator (if there is one) goes off at nine pm and you cover yourself with your mosquito netting and I am sure that you’ll take the problems of sanitation (well you know, things like a lack of potable water and basic sewerage) in your stride. After all 10 million Cambodians have to.
Perhaps you can while away the evenings with them explaining to them why they should resist the evils of electricity (there is talk of a grid from Thailand and Vietnam which will bring them cheap electricity) and that:
I think that as they’d be, most of them, living on as little as a dollar a day, and would think that to double that to two dollars a day so that they can more readily indulge in an orgy of soap buying from time to time to keep themselves and their kids clean or in an orgy of food buying to better feed their kids, would be a signal good thing you may have some trouble in convincing them, but who knows? You just might.
Perhaps your argument that:
and that they are pioneers in this may strike a chord, but I doubt it. As you go out into the rice-fields each day to help them plant or reap the rice, as part of your home-stay, you may appreciate that their lives resolve around back-breakingly difficult labour and why they yearn for those new-fangled mechanical rice-planters and rice-harvesters across the border in Thailand, which are powered by evil fossil fuels, to relieve them of it.
But if not then, from their point of view, you are part of the problem and offer no solutions. Just another carpetbagger riding on their backs and there are plenty of them already.
As polluted skies points out you are pursuing an illusion. In the 1950s the Chinese communist party was divided into two camps, the Rightists (the camp of the economically literate, sensible and pragmatic) broadly grouped under Deng Xiaoping and the Leftists (the camp of the extreme ideologues and economic illiterate) grouped under Mao Zedong. The conflict between them played out, at the cost of tens of millions of Chinese lives, until Mao’s death in 1976 and Deng’s rise in 1978, which saw the final rout of the Leftists.
Mao was the author of the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and when that failed Deng got, for a short time, the ascendancy and introduced limited agricultural reforms to undo its damage. Mao got his revenge with the Cultural Revolution which at one stage saw Deng cleaning out pig-sties. With Mao’s death Deng regained ascendancy and saw off the Leftists (you may recall the trial of the Gang of Four) for once and for all.
Mao was therefore responsible for the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. Deng, who adamantly opposed, it was the architect of China’s economic liberalisation. But you would have understood that if you had read my posts properly in the first place.
The safe hands I referred to were an allusion to Peter Costello, although under Hawke and Keating were both excellent economic managers and reformers.
All clear now?
If, to use your example, I pay someone to build me a house does that mean that person should have a veto right over my use of that house? It was my money that paid for that house to be built. It is my private property. The person who built the house for me did so in exchange for my money so that I could benefit from the house, not for the benefit of society.
Why should it be different from any other form of endeavour. I paid for it; I own it.
But at a more practical level, the issue that Karen raised which I was discussing is that, like it or not, capital is mobile and if you try to limit its flow through “veto rights” it will just go somewhere else where it has less constraints. That’s the lesson we learned in the 1970s which led to the economic reforms of the 1980s.
Economics deals with realities and not with “rights” and if you try to ignore that and try to restrain capital someone somewhere else won’t and you will be left to stagnate economically. Just as if we stop exporting coal to our economic detriment someone else will quickly pick up the slack to their economic benefit. No less coal will be burned in the world as a result. It’s a tough world out there and no-one else in the world believes that they owe Australia or its unions or its workers any favours.
Perhaps you should visit Cambodia to see just what a tough world it is. Workers in Cambodia’s garment factories get paid $2 per day. Work in those factories, which is drudgery, are highly sought after, because the alternative is unemployment and destitution. Is it any wonder that faced with that sort of competition (then from Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan) Australia’s textile, clothing and footwear industry wilted away in the 1970s.
No need to elaborate on your living conditions in Cambodia Gregm. It is already picture-perfect.
You are a dead-cert angel of mercy, living on $1 a day, in a hovel with no running water or servants or hygenic food, and you dispense largesse by day and encourage the tillers of the soil to go that extra yard, for their own good, and teach them what they have never known, how to run their own country and look after and educate and govern their own people.
At night you read your fav neoliberal ranters by candlelight and meditate on your amazing personal fortitude, self-sacrifice, compassion and uniqueness I think you should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize gregm. Truly.
re China. I see you have the “Great Man”view of history. Always a worry. And more than a little old fashioned, hackneyed, juvenile and politically useless, I have to say.
The regime today is the same Stalinist centralized bureaucracy and is one and the same as that which fashioned the “Great Leap Forward”. Why is that do you think and how can it possibly be?
And do I really need to tell you about the price paid for the current great leap forward? The human and environmental price that is, which is where our discussion began and the differences continue to lie.
Getting snarky now are we Greta? No, I’m not living in a village on one dollar a day. If I were I would not have internet access. I am the beneficiary of capital accumulation in a Western society and I would not wish to deprive any Cambodian of the benefits that such societies have. You would, it seems, be more than happy to do so.
Re your China comments I’m afraid that I’ll have to observe of you something I said in a comment I made in respect of an earlier Green commenter:
A further thought on your comment:
I’m afraid that that grandiloquent line of reasoning would go down like a lead balloon in Cambodia. You see, they’ve been there, done that.
They call it the Pol Pot years and they don’t remember it with any joy. He had the best of intentions to create utopia, just like you.
Greta, I wouldn’t bother trying to converse with GregM, he’s the kind of oaf who cannot countenance any disagreement with his doctrinare views and prejudices, and resorts to the last refuge of the intellectually barren – comparing their opponents with the personification of evil, in this case Pol Pot.
And anyone who thinks that Pol Pot had the best of intentions is basically willfully ignorant. I can recommend some wonderful books on Cambodia if you’re interested, Greg
Ok, please stay snark free, folks. This thread has strayed a long way from its topic – that’s ok, but if it starts getting personal, it might be time to bring it to an end.
Adrian, I doubt that there is a book on Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge era that I have not read over the past four years, but please make your recommendations. If any of the books you recommend is one I have not read, then I will gladly do so.
All of the books I have read, and there have been a couple of dozen, have indicated that Pol Pot was sincerely motivated, according to his own lights and his indoctrination to create, from scratch, a pure, utopian communist society purged of corruption which would re-establish the glory of the Khmers in the days of Angkor. Perverse and misconceived though his views were and and monstrous though his actions were in implementing them, I have never read anywhere that he was anything other than utterly sincere in his intentions. If you can lead me to a book which convincingly argues otherwise I would be happy to revise my views of Pol Pot.
It’s worth reflecting that within Khmer society today there is a constituency that still supports the Khmer Rouge and that when his second in command Ta Mok (aka the Butcher) died late last year there were very genuine demonstraions of grief among those people at his passing.
Cambodia and its people are perhaps more complex than you understand from the outside.
Still, I await your recommendations. Since I have spent a significant part of the last four years trying to understand Khmer society and the Khmer psyche, especially vis a vis the Pol Pot era which still hangs heavily upon them, anything that adds to my understanding will be gratefully considered.