Today’s Australian carries an edited extract of a speech by Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, on what he sees as the dangers of “climate alarmism”.
Klaus is one of the dwindling number of heads of state and/or heads of government who do not accept the consensus of climate scientists, and the large majority opinion of the world’s citizens, about the reality of climate change due to the anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse effect. However, what is interesting about the extract of his speech in the OO is that it does not attempt to seriously engage with or contest the climate science consensus. Nor does it adequately engage with the growing economic literature which suggests that substantial reductions in the carbon intensity of production can be achieved through market-based instruments and without sacrifgicing economic growth. Rather, it makes clear that Klaus’s real objection, as a Hayekian liberal, is that concern over climate change could be the Trojan Horse for a 21st century equivalent of the threat to freedom posed by totalitarian communism. He states that:
Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism… We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
Given his country’s history, and his own ideological position, it is not surprising that such concerns should loom large in Klaus’s mind. However, his speech contains some fundamental errors.
Firstly, whether or not climate change is a reality which policymakers must address is a matter to be determined, ultimately, by science. The weight of expert scientific opinion, and the growing body of scientific evidence, is that this is the case. For political leaders to refuse to accept this because they fear that it will lead to political and policy conclusions which they find unpalatable is irresponsible.
Secondly, Klaus has not learned all the necessary lessons from the history of communism. If he had, he would realise that in country after country, communists were able to win support and in some cases take power precisely because they recognised the reality and urgency of major problems sooner than other political forces, and were more decisive and single-minded in putting forward and working for solutions to those problems. This was the case from the urgency of withdrawing the Russian Empire from World War I in 1917, to the right of Vietnam to national independence and freedom from colonialism in the mid-20th century, to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. If the pro-market Right absents itself from the debate about policy solutions to climate change, that debate will be won by default by non-pro-market and non-Right forces.
It should be said in fairness that some Hayekian liberals and others on the pro-market right are alive to these points, have accepted the reality and seriousness of human-induced climate change, and are contributing to the debate about how to address it from a pro-market liberal and libertarian perspective. But Klaus’s stance, and John Howard’s speech to the American Enterprise Institute, indicate that ideologically based greenhouse denialism remains sedimented in significant sections of the global Right.
I’m not sure that the poor old Czechs would concur that their history under the Soviet heel was merely the result of Communists recognising “the reality and urgency of major problems sooner than other political forces” unless the “major problem” was an incipient Czech desire for freedom. I do, however, agree that the Communist solution to that problem was “decisive and single-minded”, as it was in the Ukraine in the early 30s.
Bismarck, my point is that the Czechs and Ukrainians wouldn’t have had the misfortunes you refer to if not for the failure of the non-Bolshevik political forces in Russia in 1917 to recognise that the Eastern Front had collapsed and the people had turned against the war, and to decisively act accordingly before being gazumped by Lenin and Trotsky.
So when did the Czechs vote in the communists what with their superior vision and boundless support? Let’s all bask in the glory of the countless communist governments that were peacefully elected to power by grateful electorates.
Klaus’ point is that there are ideologues out there who think nothing of your right to choose as a individual and are constantly seeking ways of forcing their idiotic ideas onto your lives. He’s right. Environmentalists are near the top of the list.
Havel’s warnings about the dangers that an ideologically driven government poses for individual freedom are timely. However I suggest he would do better to use the Bush Administration as an example rather than some nebulous future global warming collective.
I don’t think I’ll enter this discussion, as I think it may confuse things.
Paul, I don’t think Czechoslovakia fits your thesis. It was a parliamentary democracy from 1918 to 1938. There is nothing in the Communist accession to power that recognised “real and urgent problems” in the context of your argument other than an urgent desire to grab power. This was urgent because a parliamentary democracy was incompatible with Soviet hegemony.
Ukrainian history is also a very uncomfortable fit. It became part of the Soviet Union as the spoils of war and the defining event of the Communist regime was the genocide.
Nothing there to illustrate the glory of the farsighted and decisive problem-solving skills of Communists.
Bismarck, what I basically said in comment #2, and what I meant in the post, was that the Czechs would not have had a Soviet Union to worry about had it not been for the failure of the non-communist forces in Russia in 1917 to recognise and act decisively on a problem (i.e. the country collapsing because of the war) which the Communists did recognise and act decisively on, i.e. by taking power in the October Revolution. I was not suggesting, and would not suggest, that purely internal political developments in Czechoslovakia were an example of the phenomenon of Communist decisiveness versus non-Communist indecisiveness. I’m sorry if this wasn’t clear enough for you.
Now can we get back on topic please, everyone?
That’s certainly true about Russia itself. Nature abhors a vacuum, and unfortunately they only got a Lenin to fill it.
Back on topic:
Klaus seems to assume that there is an unbreakable connection between prosperity and carbon dioxide emissions.
I wonder whether his 19th century counterparts would argue that there’s an unbreakable connection between prosperity and horse dung?
For those wrangling about Communist ascension in Czechoslovakia it’s worth reading The Book of Laughter And Forgetting which recalls the enthusaistic support for communist ascension in that country. Naturally it didn’t last long and the Czech traditions of liberty eventually eroded the authoritarians in that country to the point where the Sovs had to intervene.
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Klaus is doing two things. In the first place he’s making a long-shot bet that AGW will come to nothing. This is possible but I think highly unwise. For those who cry out about the effects of renewable energy on economic growth I’d like them to consider the effects of rising sea levels, wild weather, mass refugee movments, ecological warfare etc.
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Unfortunately there’s a tendency to graft the environmental problem onto the standard ideological left-right map which makes less sense as you compare it to actual behaviour across history. The environmental problem is a universal problem that logic would tell you we would have to face eventually. Klaus thinks: the Greenies are lefties, the Bolshiviks were lefties, ergo the Greenies want to take away my freedom. Green politics and Marxist-Leninism have different origins and the latter’s only recently jumped the bandwagon of the former because their bandwagon’s wheels have fallen off. It’s simple minded foolishness. Things are more complex. And we’d do well to remember that Hayekian libertarians are not universally associated with freedom. Think certain students of Milton Friedman’s and a certain general in Iberian America.
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I do tend to think, however, that there is an over-emphasis on government regulation as the solution to the problem. Doubtless this will be necessary. However I also think that individual choice will be a major factor in precipitating change for the very simple reason that such choice drives the market and makes the economy move very quickly. Governments of necessity are slow beasts.
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Perhaps Mr Klaus needs to fly to California and take a meeting with a certain Guvu-nay-daw who is not only ideologically like-minded but a Greenie ratbag to boot.
What he also fails to understand that up until recently we’ve had no incentive to minimise greenhouse emissions, so it’s not surprising that they’ve risen in concert with GDP.
That has now, obviously, changed.
Which is even more surprising coming from a key figure in the demise of Eastern European communism and its aftermath. The former communist states of Eastern Europe generally had much higher per capita emissions of all kinds of pollutants, and used energy and materials much more wastefully, than their Western European neighbours, for a much lower level of material prosperity. I seeem to recall (and could be wrong) that the former East Germany had the highest level of per capita GHG emissions in the world at the time the Berlin Wall came down.
There was also an anecdote from around the time of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution about what happened when an environmental agency of a Western European country was invited to take air pollution measurements in a Czech city. The needle on their meter ran off the end of the scale because the pollution levels in the Czech city were higher than anything that the meter’s makers had thought possible in a European city.
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, is probably correct to refer to an element of “climate alarmism” in the “debate” about climate change.
This from Robert Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University, talking about Al Gore’s global warming “awareness” campaign;
Probably because it’s “inconvenient”.
This from Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America that he did not want to “pick on Al Gore”.
Professor Easterbrook disputed Mr Gore’s claim that “our civilisation has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this”, calling it nonsense, He mocked Mr Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted.
It’s increasingly obvious that the topic of climate change has indeed been co-opted by political rhetoricians who purport to be speaking with the authority of “science”.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/scientists-have-inconvenient-news-for-gore/2007/03/13/1173722471286.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
My tip is that “cliamte change” alarmism will in a couple of years looks as quaint as the 1950s hysteria among UK teachers over “Horror Comics” .
That’s not to say we shouldn’t be concerned about the impacts of various forms of pollution on our environment, but there’s obviously a lot of “chicken little” hysteria concerning climate change.
Empires have collapsed because of environmental degradation, notably some of the ancient empires of the Near East. Either their water supply dried up or they couyld no longer grow food because of soil degradation.Somilar catastrophes occurred in Pre-Columbian America. Rhat’s what we have in store for us if our politicians don’t face thre reality of the dcience and do something about global warming. Paranoia about past political systems that didn’t agree with Adam Smith and failure to recognise neo-liberal capitalism is probably the most environmentally destructive system of government out of them all (and that includes present day China) doesn’t help.
And so they do.
One thing that’s always bothered me about some economists is that they never explain how we can have limitless growth within a finite system. I suspect that people like Klaus don’t live in the real world.
I fell asleep here.A couple of points that seem almost glib like glib,plenty of assertion of what came first and how they differ Green versus Marxist Leninist,ah,where is Jack Mundey!?Thats not Europe or Czech Republic,but what about the indomitable Russians who think Greenhouse is actually a precursor to an ice age!? There are a few well qualified scientists from Russia saying that.So I guess there couldnt be small c Communist and small g Greens either in Europe.And the Russian scientist today,may not even be driven by Russian historical influences And all this seems sort of pointless because conservation matters did occasionally get a hold of even old U.S.S.R. or National Geographic was a KGB plot.And it therefore follows that Vlad the lad, Putin was always a Greenie in disguise!?.And this constant suggestion that those who cannot accept the Climate Change stuff are in some minority as scientists,and have no Green credentials is as boring as it is inaccurate.What is happening is a sort of cultural clash about the meaningfulness of particular views.It is very similar to the biomedically trained versus traditionally trained nature cure or herbalist stuff.But, the difference is the Physics type scientists arent being fully acknowledge in the modern versus traditional.Forget about Australian Skeptic type windbags ,which have their counterparts overseas..whatever they are trying to make people realise isnt emboldened by their choices of warrior to prove something about themselves,by declaring some matters are not science.And I think that is where a more bountiful agreement in principle has failed on what this weather changing stuff means,because the skeptic types are muddying the waters,on behalf of those who are not accepting climate change matters.Europe ,generally would have all the various angles of views on this as Australians,and still the MSM. will tend to choose experts for combatative reasons,whilst those really concerned may not be seeking publicity at all,because of the limitations of time and the journalistic art,which is pretty shocking most of the time.How relevant this is ,generally to the blog,I dont know,I have my problems.
David, some economists do try to explain it in terms of “decoupling” of economic growth from growth in resource throughput and generation of wastes. The argument is that if the rate of reduction in resources used and wastes generated per unit of economic output is consistently equal to or greater than the rate of economic growth, economic growth can continue without exceeding ecological and biophysical limits.
Those economists who are optimistic about the prospects for rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions argue precisely this point, namely that there is great scope for reduction in the carbon intensity per unit of economic output in industrial economies. It is precisely this point which Klaus sweepingly rejects in his speech. Eco-liberal economists such as Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken and others in the Natural Capitalism/Factor 4/Factor 10 school argue that similar possibilities exist in relation to other economic factors.
Whilst I think there is much to be said for this argument, the sticking point is whether “decoupling” and “dematerialisation” can continue indefinitely to run ahead of the rate of economic growth, or whether there are ultimate thresholds beyond which resource throughput and waste generation cannot be further minimised. If such thresholds do exist, it will be ultimately impossible to have perpetual economic growth in a finite system.
This also ignores the possibility that humanity may well be able to expand its reach – in the longer term – beyond Earth. That should push back the resources crunch a very long way
Craig – There’s been a lot of nonsense written about the Australian Greens etc comparing them to Nazis et al. I have yet to see any evidence of this. Socially speaking it’s the most liberal party in parliament. Economically of course it’s quite a different story. But I’ve yet to encounter a Green who’s raison d’etre is the deprivation of liberty.
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I myself have criticized the Greens I think for good reason. But this equalization of Greens with totalitarians is simply nonsense.
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One of the significant missing elements of the debate is usally the central one: the environmental impacts of the (post)industrial economy. Whenever I hear Andrew Bolt or some such wail on about how Bob Brown wants us all to go back and live in the Dark Ages I roll my eyes. The point is not to go back to ACE 800 but to avoid going back there.
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There are certainly ‘deep green’ puritans who idolize the agrarian past (usually from the luxurious vantagepoint of a postmodern present using Mac laptops) however I don’t see them having much effect on the mainstream debate. Nevertheless Paul’s point is a generous one. He’s basically saying that the Right’s insitent denialism merely serves to exclude itself from the debate. This is apparent on the Right where market-orientated solutions meet with hostility because they are engaging it at all, see here.
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He’s inviting the Right to the table. If only John Howard had been so generous.
How so? Perhaps the qualifier ‘neo-liberal’ is essential altho’ the term’s become a little vague mashed in with libertarian, neoconservative, paleolibertarian blah blah blah. But ideological fashions are impermanent. Capitalism linked to liberal democracy cannot be, on the evidence regarded as ecologically destructive as command systems or systems (like China) where a market system co-exists with a one-party authoritarian state.
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Reason: simple. People don’t like breathing black smoke. In a democracy the government is compelled to do something about it. In a market economy people can choose environmentally sound products, or at least those promoted as such
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The post-industrial economy of whatever stripe is obviously potentially more environmentally destructive than any other. But it also potentially more sutainable than any other for the simple reason that we have more knowledge and more tools at our disposal to make it so. We also have the historical vantage of the modern era. We can read books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse and gain wisdom.
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I feel the thing to do is stop having all these ‘ism’ arguments and start talking techniques.
Economic thinking always astonishs me!
They consistently simplify by eliminating complications like lag time and tend to treat resources as infinite. In addition, the laissez-faire types treat all economics as if it were pre-Industrial Revolution – with the result you get nonsense like WorkChoices.
What environmentalists want is quite simple and noble – minimal waste(both commercial & domestic) and enough wild space for the Earth to retain its lungs. Neither is incompatible with “freedom”.
If Craig Mc wishes to engage in self destructive behaviour could he please find another planet to do it on!
Well, it’s not their goal, just their means. If they’re allowed have it.
Dear god, don’t confuse carbon taxes with market-oriented solutions. That’s just slapping a politically driven tax on an arbitrary output to artificially distort that market. A market-oriented solution would be to develop a product emitting less carbon and selling it to willing customers for a profit. It doesn’t even have to be economic, just attractive enough to customers that they’ll buy it.
And the debate goes one whether the left thinks so or not.
Paul, thanks for explaining the decoupling of economic growth from growth in resource usage. I’m still not convinced that there isn’t a hard limit, however. Although it’s certainly true that we can do more with fewer resources and less waste, I don’t believe we can get the resource usage down to zero, which is what this seems to imply.
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In any case it’s clear (from his simple-minded equation relating economic growth and CO2 production, if nothing else) that Klaus is _not_ an economist of the sort you mentioned.
The greens have begun their forced deportations!
Green Fascism. There’s a book in it, GregM. You can ask Jonah Goldberg for his notes.
Gah! Craig Mc, not GregM – sorry.
Well if you mean by means that the Greens favour regulatory solutions to environmental problems you would have a point. But to extend this into the realm of, what did you say, ‘forced deportations’ or any other totalitarian riff is silly. In the long term such talk will discredit those who utter it. I pity Mr Bolt. I suspect that he will look back upon his career at retirement and think “if only I’d gone for the knowledge and not the money, people might still be reading me”…
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Carbon taxes are not a solution that the market generated to be sure but they are a relatively market friendly method of curbing emissions. One shouldn’t simply make the assumption that the market will provide solutions. The market’s great at providing solutions provided there’s money to be made in it. For that reason there’s a certain amount of short-sightenedness. A cursory look at the history of banks making wild loans in boom times or the extremely imprudent spending sprees of finance firms in same demonstrates fairly clearly that many people in private enterprise persist in failing to learn from history or taking a long-term view of things.
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I myself believe we will probably develop cleaner and more renewable sources of energy in this century. But rather than counting on it we should take prudent steps now. I also advocate certain free market approaches to the energy industry. To wit I’d like the cosy relationship between mining/energy interests and the governments of the world to STOP please. Governments have no business making these choices for us. And the coal, petroleum industries etc have no right to expect special priviledges.
That indeed is my point.
That was a joke, Joyce. I’ll add a winkie next time.
It’s hard to tell. There are people sayin’ it and they aren’t joking.
Craig Mc:
Correctly executed, carbon/pollution taxes are a correction to the distortion that the “free market” indulges in so gleefully – that of externalities.
Simply put, externalitites happen when a third-or-fourth party to any deal is forced to bear the costs associated with it, despite making no choice to become involved. Example: A factory opens up, and starts pouring waste (quite legally) in the river. You live downstream. The factory benefits – it makes and sells goods. The consumer benefites – they buy those goods. You lose out, despite having done nothing wrong or stupid. This is where the government steps in and forces the factory to either pay a tax or clean up the river. If the factory owner decides that its cheaper to pay, he pays. If it’s cheaper to clean up, he cleans up. And you don’t have to bear the costs of other peoples’ behaviour. Imposing the tax is termed “internalising the externality” – making people bear all of the costs of their actions, not just those they can’t physically avoid.
Imagine this scenario on a larger scale – the planet. We are causing the pollution through our demand. Should we not then pay marginally higher prices, in order to reduce the incentive to pollute, and put the money to use cleaning up pollution?
Great post. Agree 100%.
Here’s one example of an environmentalist who seems to be proposing draconian regulatory solutions:
Whoops, screwed up formatting. Last two paras of the above are mine.
Well that’ll be wonderful for the economy I’m sure.
‘Klaus is one of the dwindling number of heads of state and/or heads of government who do not accept the consensus of climate scientists, and the large majority opinion of the world’s citizens, about the reality of climate change due to the anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse effect.’
Science is not consensus, but about verifiable and replicable results. In any case the IPCC ‘consensus’ does not actually exist. Else why the NIPCC counter-report, for just one example?
And as the work of Rhodes Fairbridge etc has pointed out for the last 50 years or so, the major input into terrestrial climate is solar output – which varies. So the value of blaming it all on CO2 levels well within atmospheric norms seems negligible.
Klaus has a solid point, which stating mere hypotheses as ‘fact’, as you do in the post, does nothing whatsoever to invalidate.
This particular enviro-scare is merely the latest in a long progression (it is not even new). The only thing new is just how much money its promoters are making from the gullible and foolish.
MarkL
canberra
The sum total of damages caused by global warming could be disbursed with a threepence, and that would include a gratuity.
“Would everyone commenting here be happy to have only one chance to travel overseas for the rest of your lives?”
I assume this means air travel. What’s wrong with a boat?
Comment Number 22 says, in part:
“Economic thinking always astonishs me!
They consistently simplify by eliminating complications like lag time and tend to treat resources as infinite.”
Scarcity is the defining feature of economics. Since scarcity is inconsistent with limitless resources, this statement is nonsense.
A clarification of my previous comment (number 39 on this thread): Saying it is nonsense may be too harsh. I should simply have said that the statement is wrong.
The term nonsense was too harsh. To avoid confusion, the following is how I would prefer the first comment (number 39 on this thread) to appear:
Comment Number 22 says, in part:
“Economic thinking always astonishs me!
They consistently simplify by eliminating complications like lag time and tend to treat resources as infinite.”
Scarcity is the defining feature of economics. Since scarcity is inconsistent with limitless resources, this statement is wrong.
Damien,
only the individual models assume scarcity. Macro economic models don’t.
The Australian Greens do tend to favour regulatory micromanagement of environmental policy. I find it annoying and counterproductive; it’s absolute anathema to those on the political right, even if they support the goals.
Furthermore, in the broader green movement there tends to be:
* a prejudice that big business is bad and small business and individuals are better.
* a belief that denying oneself consumption is in itself somehow virtuous.
* a bias against macro-scale engineering solutions to environmental problems
* a tendency to support “environmental” solutions that just happen to support their broader social goals (however laudable those social goals may be)
Yeah, economists hate Greg Hardin.
Pesky biologists.
Lol, The Tragedy of Common Misunderstanding
Well, that might have something to do with the Greens not being a party on the political right.
Just a thought.
Incidentally, Klaus made his speech at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, a gathering of the usual gang of muffin puffers claiming to be voices of truth and reason crying in the wilderness.
The link in my previous comment also sheds some light on the NIPCC, referred to in #36. And this link sheds some light on the chief author of the NIPCC “counter-report”.
“Heretics” is the word you’re looking for Paul.
No it isn’t Craig. If I burn you, MarkL and Eliot Ramsey at the stake you’ll be contributing to particulate pollution as well as GHG emissions, and I wouldn’t want that to happen.
One might say that the greenhouse denialists have already blazed a trail in this direction.
Yes, for sure. Later on this year our family is having a reunion (siblings and partners) in Europe. I’ve never been there before, but more to the point, given our ages it’s probable that one or some of us will die before we can attempt it again. If I go again, I’ll purchase offsets.
There is a lot to comment on in this thread. I’ll have to let most of it go.
Carbon intensity and GDP. From memory Stern says that energy efficiency increased 7 fold in the US in the last century. The carbon intensity of the global economy has been consistently improving throughout the 20th century and it has been assumed that this would continue. Unfortunately in the early years of the 21st century carbon intensity started heading in the wrong direction, presumably because of what is happening in China, India and the developing world.
There have been a few interesting reports on climate change and security recently. I intended to do a post, but I’m far too busy and the material is hard to round up. If you are interested, some Americans put one together (large pdf), which RealClimate discussed here, the Germans took one to Bali (large pdf) and just the other day the EU have had a go. There are plenty of references but I haven’t found the report yet.
The American one contemplates three scenarios on the basis of “expected”, “severe” and “catastrophic” climate change., all of which are regarded as “plausible”. The catastrophic scenario assumes 2 metres of sea-level rise in the next century. This would threaten most major cities in the world, or their water supplies and inundate a large proportion of industrial infrastructure.
The implications go far beyond the usual climate refugees. What happens if most of the American naval facilities go under?
The US report is especially negative about what would happen socially/politically. While the German report sees an increased incidence of state failure amongst the least developed countries, the American report sees this happening in the major economies. They take it as axiomatic, for example, that the EU would abandon the Dutch to their fate.
So in the US they assume that government would break down completely and there would be a scramble for survival with the elites looking after themselves.
It should be noted the 2 metres of sea-level rise is not the worst scenario running around. Hansen points out that we could get 5 metres if we only saw a repeat of what happened 14,500 years ago. He has bet $1000 to a donut (I think he means London to a brick) that this scenario will be nearer to the mark than the scenario outlined in IPCC4 which squibbed the issue.
OTOH, if Carter is right (pdf) and we are unequivocally in for a period of cooling in the next few decades (he’s essentially a joke among real scientists – they don’t bother with him any more) then we can all relax while he collects his Nobel Prize.
Robert Merkel #43
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Yep.
Bill Posters: that’s fine, but I think the Greens are lily-gilding. They’re selling a bunch of policies as the only way to combat climate change, when in fact the policies represent one way to combat climate change with a whole lot of side effects which may or may not be desirable.
I actually wonder to what extent Green politics per se as opposed to the policies of the Australian Greens needs must have much to do with the various ideological positions. Seems to me that the Greens spend a lot more time promoting Social-Democratic positions to the left of the ALP than they do talking about ecological problems and solutions.
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Much of the scientific solutions to problems like genetic modification agriculture replacing chemical mass agriculture are rejected out of hand. What are we supposed to do? Go back to organic (ie pre-industrial) agriculture en masse? This will result in famine.
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Or energy policy. The Greens are state-based and have several mutually contradictory policies re energy. None of them really seem to tackle the very hard questions. If we wean ourselves off fossil fuels what will replace it with? I tend to support renewables and nuclear gives me the heebees but what if nuke is the only viable alternative? Rejecting it is not an option. But the Greens maintain a lofty high ground that seems more important to them than engaging in the arena, dirty as it is.
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I don’t think the mainstream parties take the environment seriously as a policy issue (they do take it seriously as an electoral issue however). The Greens could, and I feel should, be putting a lot of energy into developing environmental policy but I don’t see it. I see instead a position whereby it’s the Dirty Capitalist Leviathan that’s to blame and if only everyone followed us to Agrarian Shang Ri-La we’d all dance in circles and sing Kumbaya.
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Good luck with that.
I think the Green equivalent is composting or could we claim we were old-growth?
Dam you all to hell you pre-historic greenhouse emitters! How do people write this stuff with a straight face?
Craig – tipping points, man… TIPPING POINTS!!! Human CO2 needn’t force ALL the warming, y’know.
No FDB your are lying. There are no tipping points. GMB told me so. So it must be true.
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Craig there’s a tight corellation between Co2 and warming. The atmosphere doesn’t care where the Co2 comes from. We might tho’.
Craig Mc, are you saying that Meltwater Pulse 1A didn’t happen? At that time the waters rose a metre every 20 years for 400 years. Right now the climate forcing is about 20 times stronger than it was then.
Of course it was a different ice sheet, but you have to balance what actually happened with the notion beloved until now by many glaciologists that ice sheets melt over millenia rather than centuries.
In spite of my agricultural youth I can’t give you all the details, but there is organic farming happening on an industrial scale. There are techniques like low tillage farming and controlled traffic farming which, I understand, use far less energy and turn carbon loss from soils into carbon gain.
One of these days I hope to get time to look into it more, but it’s not all gloom.
“One of these days I hope to get time to look into it more, but it’s not all gloom.”
Brian, I attended a 3 day course which finished last week and the course was partly sponsored by the the NSW DPI and the Heritage Council.
The course was about farming and climate change focusing on building up the carbon stores in the soil and the analysing your land’s water and soil profiles so that “all farm” planning allowed for less fertile areas to be used as carbon store through forestry.
Control traffic farming as I understand it addresses the problems of machinery causing soil compaction and thereby affecting it’s storage capacity but it is a practice all farmers should be following anyway. Minimum tillage is designed to lower decomposition losses of CO2 into the atmosphere and is also becoming the normal practice.
The course notes are very well laid out and quite comprehensive – they get as technical as your competence allows basically .
If you would like to obtain the course material perhaps you could contact the DPI via the Wollongbar Agricultural Institute , Wollongbar 2477. The contact person is Greg Reid. 02 6626 1213.
The politics of who funds this course is a whole puzzle in itself and if this state’s beaurocratic muddle around the issue of climate change is symptomatic of how things are going to develop nationally it will be a frustrating time ahead for
many.
murph, thanks for the information. I hear about these things mainly on RN’s Bush Telegraph. On Monday 3 March I heard an interesting segment on soil carbon. Go to the archives for 3 March and listen to the whole program. “Soil carbon” is the first, starting at 1:20 into the download.)
They reckon that 82% of all the carbon is stored in soils – it’s the biggest sink of the lot. By turning marginal sandy soils over to pasture, they figure they can store roughly 70 million tonnes of CO2 pa in those soils. It seems that carbon is released directly from the roots into the soil by action of fungi. It makes a difference what you grow.
Back on controlled traffic farming, I have information sources quite close to home, as my younger brother is a recently retired ag scientist. Last time I saw him he said he was sending me a paper by Jeff Tullberg who didn’t invent controlled traffic farming, but has been largely responsible for developing it as a technique in the context of modern farming. They did it at Gatton College, and I’m assured were world leaders until last year when the University of Queensland decided they were all basically useless and offered them retirement packages. I’m told Jeff has now set up a private consultancy with another bloke. I’ve met Jeff umpteen times at my bro’s place.
Anyway my bro being a baby boomer on the loose is hard to find at times so I googled.
This one illustrates the concept. I gather they use geosat technology to hit the same track every time.
This one from Landline goes into the history, with extensive comment from Dr Tullberg.
My brother says you save up to 30% of the energy output of the tractor by not digging up the wheel tracks. Obviously, though, you need to use roundup to stop the weeds etc growing on the tracks.
Anyway that’ll do for now as it’s a bit off topic.
Controlled traffic farming,wasnt invented it was observed,from the behaviour of tractors on grape growing blocks where the soil and the small Fergies in use allowed the tractor to roll along on previous tracks whilst the farmer driver loaded the grapes on board the trailer.The observation was communicated to a small newspaper that didnt publ.the communication but passed it on,that Newspaper was the Dorrigo based Don Dorrigo Gazette.It is more relevant today with or without GPS in mattersof Greenhouse abatement matters because it proves the point the farmer may not need to be on the tractor,and thus allows greater work incl.analysis of soil etc incl.carbon.