I didn’t say that we’d be materially better off than an alternate universe where climate change isn’t an issue and we continue to burn fossil fuels with impunity. I’m merely arguing that economic growth with grossly outweigh the costs of mitigation

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Its conceivable that nominal (financially measured) conomic growth with carbon fuels would be greater than nominal (financially measured) economic growth without carbon fuels. This makes the dubious assumption that ecological externalities are of no economic consequence. Which may be true for HVI’s and others capable of ecological insulation.

It is likely that significant economic dislocation from flooding, storms and droughts will occur. Policy makers reluctant to commit to carbon curbing will then opt for finger-in-the-dyke adaptation strategies. I think this is the logic behind the PRC’s go-for-broke industrial growth strategy. Grow and save now for the non-rainy days in the future.

The same economic logic applies if one makes the less dubious assumption that climate change would occur anyway, even with institutional carbon constraints. I think that this is the conclusion of Hansen-ite tipping pointers.

I am a little skeptical of the ETS as an effective curb on carbon emissions, in any case. The carbon price will have to be sky-high in order to be effective as constraint, rather than displacer, of carbon emissions.

So far it looks more like an elaborate rort for the savvier carbon fuel floggers and their financial handmaidens. It does however give the general populace the impression that “something is being done” about stranded polar bears and the like.

Robert Merkel says:

The second point is that you’re missing the other positive side effects of decarbonization. As I’ve pointed out in the past, the health toll of urban air pollution in Australia is something akin to the health toll of road accidents. In Europe and the USA it is worse. In China it is diabolical. The EU has done economic modelling saying that switching away from fossil fuels will pay for itself on those grounds alone.

I acknowledge that this is probably true. It implies that long term residents of relatively clean rural and regional environs should present with much lower rates of illness from respiratory illness, compared to long term residents of relatively polluted urban environs. AUS studies?

The best long term strategy to minimise vehicle emissions is to build massive subways/light rails, ala London, Berlin, New York, Moscow, Paris. This, incidentally, is the best infrastructural reform you can make to turn your city into a fun place to live.

Anyway, you are right about the WA Green Sentaors - I guess I always think of them as different, as they were a specifically separate party at the time and took a different approach - however the number of occasions they were in a blocking situation was very rare, as the Democrats would usually do that first. The original Native Title Bill and the Dawkins Budget were two main exceptions - although the Democrats at the time were also insisting on major amendments, but the WA Greens were also pushing for what they saw as improvements. The toing and froing between the differing Indigenous perspectives around the Democrat and WA Green camps was quite intruiging in itself.

The Native Title Bill is also a good example of how crucial the Liberals’ tactical decisions are. If John Hewson had chosen to engage with Native Title rather than just pander to ignorance and the racists and oppose it outright - a decision no doubt influenced by the fact he was in a weak leadership position at the time - they almost certainly could have got the Bill amended to better meet the views of their resource and pastoralist constituency. Instead, they sulked on the sidelines predicting pestilence and plague, and the Democrats and WA Greens were able to get it amended to better suit the views and meet the needs of Indigenous Australians (although far from perfect too I might say)

Could be a lesson there for the Libs on emissions trading legislation.

Robert, we are already in overshoot. The targets we are espousing as plainly conservative according to the latest science, and we get slammed for them regularly. If we thought we could go zero fast, that’s what we’d be advocating. Can I ask what kind of emissions trajectory you think we should aim for, and what you think the result might be? Particularly considering nobody quite knows what the result of major overshoot might be…

Politics aside for a minute, 40% cuts and more are easily technically achievable by 2020. It would involve putting into the effort the kind of resources we allocate to health or defence. A few tens of billions a year and we could easily reduce energy demand by 50% over that time (for the same output of services) and power well over half of the remaining energy demand with renewables. Add to that a significant shift in transport behaviour and infrastructure, changes in agriculture and a halt to native forest logging and we’d surpass that target substantially. It’s totally achievable, technically.

But politics isn’t aside, and we all know that. How will the Greens end up voting on the ETS? How can we possibly say until we know what the ETS will be like? But carbonsink @ 14 - it’s not true that a bad ETS is better than no ETS at all. I can easily imagine legislation that sets up an ETS so full of holes and benefits to polluters that it would cement the status quo and undermine any other efforts to reduce emissions. That would be worse than no ETS, for sure.

Again, this view may have been wrong, but I’m pretty sure the senators thought at the time we were going backwards with it.

It’s also not true to say the Greens never had the numbers to block - they did at several points, most notably from 93-96. The Greens WA Senators threatened to block the post Mabo legislation, but their justification was that for certain aboriginal groups the draft would make things worse, even though for others it would certainly have made things better. Their bottom line was that no Indigenous population should be worse off, and once they believed they had got that got that they voted for it.

I’m not very fond of assessing or proposing political strategies - I’d usually rather focus on the substance of an issue - but given the Libs’ apparent confusion on this issue, it may make a lot of sense for them to basically adopt the strategy of saying they won’t block action being taken, so they don’t have to spend much energy saying what should be done instead. They can then focus on pointing out all the painful bits to the electorate.

A bit like the strategy Keating took to the 1993 election on Hewson’s GST - slagging it off while promising not to block it, thus putting the focus on the GST rather than on his alternative.

At some stage they’ll have to have a credible alternative, as I doubt they’ll be able to promise to ‘rip it up’ once its in place - which is different to Workchoices (not that Labor has really ripped up Workchoices anyway, but the perception is that they can and have/will, which I suppose is what counts from a political perspective) - but letting it through would keep the focus on the government, rather than the Libs.

Howard had many double dissolution triggers and never used them.

Assuming the Libs deal themselves out of the picture, it may simply be impossible for the ALP to get a position which both the Greens and FF agree to, regardless of the desires of either smaller party for a double dissolution (generally, both are more likely to have a better situation after a DD than after a half-Senate election).

The ALP is also likely to have better Senate numbers after a DD, and the Libs less - although the cross bench make up is harder to predict, it is more likely that Labor might end up in a situation where they only need the Greens to get something through, rather than the current mish-mash - but that should be the situation for them after the next half-Senate election too.

Even if some sort of legislation on emissions trading gets through, I expect Labor will pick up at least one double dissolution before the end of the year, even without trying. They are already half way there on a couple of Bills.

What it will all boil down to is whether Labor thinks having an early election will benefit them. If they were able to use emssions trading as a reason, it could well be a benefit - esp if the Libs continue to be a mess. But we’re still talking about next year at the earliest, so there’s a lot can happen between now and then.

The situation is different for oil. If peak oil is really happening, there’s no discretion whatsoever in the matter but to find substitutes, economic pain or not.

Which directly contradicts this statement:

transport - particularly personal transport - is probably going to be one of the last sectors to be decarbonized.

So, if peak oil is really happening, we need to substitute oil first, but otherwise it would be substituted last.

For the record, I don’t believe (geological) peak oil is happening now, but I do believe we have entered a phase where supply growth is slowing and flattening while demand (driven by the BRICs) still wants to grow. This is due to a combination of geological, political and economic reasons. The real geological peak happens in the 2012-2013 timeframe.

BTW, did you this in yesterday’s BusinessWeek suggesting the Saudi’s won’t be able to raise production, despite what they say:

Saudi Oil: A Crude Awakening on Supply?

The Saudis say they can ramp up production to 12.5 million barrels a day. But a field-by-field breakdown obtained by BusinessWeek shows that’s not likely

The Greens have also indicated quite clearly in the press that they are talking to all parties, which I think bodes well. I really doubt that the Greens are going to force a DD over climate change - the issue is far too important, and the potential political gains are high-risk stakes.

Why anyone bothers reading anything Kerr has to say on the Greens is beyond me; I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s actually pathologically incapable of thinking and writing about them rationally. Bernard Keane on Crikey has been pleasing as a replacement for Kerr in that he actually applies the same open-minded but critical analysis to the Greens as every other party. Refreshing.

I didn’t say that we’d be materially better off than an alternate universe where climate change isn’t an issue and we continue to burn fossil fuels with impunity. I’m merely arguing that economic growth with grossly outweigh the costs of mitigation.

The second point is that you’re missing the other positive side effects of decarbonization. As I’ve pointed out in the past, the health toll of urban air pollution in Australia is something akin to the health toll of road accidents. In Europe and the USA it is worse. In China it is diabolical. The EU has done economic modelling saying that switching away from fossil fuels will pay for itself on those grounds alone.

http://alsblog.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/the-coming-federal-election/

But even if they don’t, the ALP won’t deal. They have nothing to gain.

A stricter ETS will antagonise FF & sympathetic Liberals and ensure that the policy isn’t passed. And it will also make the ALP look too close to the Greens, which is politically dangerous. Nothing to gain. Something to lose. No deal.

A moderate ETS may ultimately get passed with the Liberal support or a Liberal conscience vote. Putting the Liberals in this position is probably the ideal political outcomem for the ALP. The pressure on the Libs would be large, and the internal Liberal debate would spill into the public. And then either outcome is a win for the ALP.

Either the ETS is supported, and the ALP gets a political & policy win. Or the ETS is blocked and the ALP gets a DD election against Brendan Nelson. I don’t think a DD is that exciting for the ALP in general, but I think they have an incentive to go to the polls against Nelson before he is rolled.

Now it gets interesting… because I think the Liberals and Family First may also like the idea of a DD. Steve Fielding knows that FF has no chance in a half senate election, but they do have some chance in a DD.

The Liberal reason for a DD requires more imagination. But two things make it possible. First, the Gippsland by-election may lead the Liberals to relish the idea of going to an election on fuel prices. Billboard adverts with “Petrol… Liberals = $1.60 // Labor = $1.90″ or something like that could trigger Gippsland like responses. Second, Nelson probably knows his days are numbered, and this is the only chance he will have to save himself. Given his current support it makes sense for him to take a political risk, and making a stand on an ETS & fuel prices might be it. If he loses it makes little difference because he was on his way out anyway. So there is only upside if he takes a punt.

From a federal perspective - no there isn’t a single case, because they didn’t have the numbers to block anthing. But they certainly opposed many things that would fit in this category. Most obvious in my experience was the EPBC Act in 1999 - not perfect, but a big advance in the right direction which was none the less, viciferously and abusively opposed then and for a long time afterwards.
Good politics no doubt, but no recognition about the movement forward in environmental protection.

The big political advantage the Greens will have in the new Senate is if they do decide to make a compromise on an issue which isn’t great but is still “moving in the direction they wanted but not moving as far or as fast as they wanted”, they won’t have another ‘like minded’ party alongside them in the Senate kicking the shit out of them for doing so.

Christian Kerr said the other day that Penny Wong was thinking of looking to the Coalition rather than the Greens and independents. He was claiming to have some information to that effect.

There is some logic in the Coalition abstaining. They might think that the ETS will kill Labor in the electorate. Some have claimed it’s Labor’s WorkChoices only worse.

As I’ve said in the past, I think we can decarbonize our society, and we can do it in a way that leaves us even better off than before.

Thats plainly false. Animals may be better off if we manage to arrest habitat destruction but nothing can beat the better-offedness of virtually free energy that we have been enjoying since WWII.

Put simply in the good old days a typical household could pay for its weekly carbon energy needs with about a half-days labour, maybe less. To “decarbonise society” will mean typical households will have to give up closer to a days labour to pay for the higher cost of renewable generation plus labour-wasting adaptations.

Robert Merkel says:

I just don’t think that people in the developed world are prepared to wear the economic disruption required to do it in a decade. I think the people of the rapidly developing world are even less likely to.

I am dubious about the possibility of “decarbonising society” when the USA, PRC and IND appear set on high-carbon energy infrastruture. With those jurisdictions not expressing much political will to change in a hurry.

In the USA the Green vote is small, the DEM vote is 50% pro-working stiff Clinton. In the PRC no one, least of all Greens, has a vote bar the polituburo which is mostly composed of business-minded engineers. And in IND everyone is obsessed with catching up with PRC.

Not to mention the inconvenient truth that the tipping point for polar meltdown is already probably passed. Which may make institutional and instrumental attempts at climate change mitigation entirely futile.

Robert Merkel says:

Furthermore, I am optimistic that there are technological means that this can be done, so it won’t be a complete disaster.

Perhaps. The carbon price has to be set really really high to get tech fixes happening really really soon. That would imply massive interim economic disruption and destruction of value.

LPG conversions give some idea of the speed at which the general public can act given correct taxes, subsidies and prices. Glimmer of hope for the tecchie-fixers there.

But LPG has been around for yonks and is not exactly rocket science.

[Disclosure: my recent predictive record about recent regional catastrophes and their resolution is poor. I took a “she’ll be right” attitude towards regime change in Iraq. Things panned out worse than worst case scenarion. Then I lurched towards the opposite attitude, assuming “shell never be right” in that god-saken place. But now things are better than expected. Although, generally speaking, no one ever went broke underestimating the civility of that awful place.]