Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
On a day when fear ran rampant around “the markets”, some distraction from the Apocalypse might come from considering horror movies.
Incidentally, lots of the pre-tribulationist Rapture watchers in the US have been expecting the world to end on Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year - which is why Congress is closing down for two days. Weird!
Anyways, back on topic. I agree this is the scariest movie scene ever. From Mulholland Drive:
The Nancy Pelosi speech that made the Republicans cry:
Context in this post about the Congressional rejection of TARP.
If this is true, we’re in even deeper climate trouble than we thought:
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
As the Wikipedia explains, there is a lot of methane locked up as frozen methane clathrate under the arctic ocean. Methane is a short-lived, but very potent greenhouse gas. If the clathrates are warmed up enough, they will release that methane, and possibly quite quickly. The upshot? Global warming going a lot faster and further than the IPCC models.
This is far scarier than a little trouble with the LIBOR…
Australia’s total greenhouse emissions, assuming a 450ppm target and “backstop technology”. Source: Garnaut Review Final Report, Figure 23.6
I thought I’d do this quick post to note the passing of Tim Dunlop’s Blogocracy Blog at News Ltd.
This will be the last weekend open thread; in fact, it will be the last thread of any sort here at Blogocracy. I have handed in my notice and I am finishing up today. I do this with a great deal of sadness but also with a sense of excitement about new prospects.
Establishing his blogging cred at Road to Surfdom, Tim became one of Australia’s notable and most thoughtful bloggers so it was no surprise to see him get a gig somewhere in the MSM. It wasn’t without some early difficulties but the blog found its space and audience and Tim probably delivered what the editors wanted.
It’s easy to be critical, but as any full time blogger knows, two years plugging away at a very busy blog is hard work and can rub the creative edges off any writer.
Happily we hear that Tim is off to recharge his creative batteries; that will eventually produce a book, something that I’ll look forward to, so he should know he’ll sell at least one copy.
So long and thanx for the fish Tim.
Vote count:
Democrats: 141 Yea, 94 Nay
Republican: 66 Yea, 132 Nay
The Times - Analysis: bailout vote calls Hank Paulson’s bluff
Negotiators had worked all weekend to accommodate some of the doubts of conservative Republicans who objected to such a massive outlay of taxpayer funds on the financial sector. But in the end the largely superficial changes made to the original plan were not enough and more than three-quarters of Republicans voted against. Worse, perhaps, more than a third of Democrats also opposed the measure, which they saw as a handout to rich bankers on Wall Street.
Now, in effect, the politicians have called the bluff of Hank Paulson, the US Treasury Secretary. Since he first proposed the plan ten days ago he has repeatedly warned that its passage was absolutely essential to avoid a complete freezing-up of the US financial system.
It’s out today. LP bloggers will have more during the day as it’s digested, but here’s an open thread for instant analysis and commentary. Please also feel free to link in comments to other posts or articles.
By way of preview, a number of climate scientists have released an open letter to Kevin Rudd (text here):
The Garnaut Review concluded that an emission reduction target for Australia of 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 would be an equitable contribution to the international effort required to achieving this outcome. As a group of Australia’s leading climate change scientists, we urge you to adopt this target as the minimum requirement for Australia’s contribution to an effective global climate agreement.
In Crikey yesterday, Bernard Keane contrasted the apocalyptic prophesies of doom emanating from business with the rather lame reality of the government’s proposals to date.
Nightmare stuff. Imagine how bad it would be the Government had actually proposed a serious effort to reduce our carbon emissions?
As Keane notes in another article, the release of the Treasury modelling today:
should provide a welcome corrective to much of the hysteria generated by modelling commissioned by rentseeking industry groups.
Keane also observes that Garnaut will be talking about adaptation strategies and costs in this report as well.
Note: Related post from dk.au on public opinion, polls and climate change.
Update: The report has now been released and can be downloaded from here.
Update: From Crikey, Bernard Keane on Garnaut at a glance and Clive Hamilton on politics trumping science.
Elsewhere [dk.au]: Barry Brooks is also running an open thread at his blog Climate Dilemma [ht: Peter Wood in comments]
Joshua Gans comments on Chapter 14 (TEEIIs) which he argues is “dramatically superior” to the Green Paper solution of free permits. He also renews his call for border adjustment taxes:
In my opinion, it would be better to bite the bullet and, at least for imports, assess the carbon cost of those imports and tax them. This will get the price signals right and also put pressure on trading partners to put in their own emissions trading schemes so as to avoid that tax.
I discussed some of the issues around paid parental leave in an earlier post. The Productivity Commission has now released its interim report, recommending a model which would see the government pay for 18 weeks of parental leave at the level of the federal minimum wage (with 2 weeks for partners, and with employers only contributing compulsory super). Some criticism has revolved around the failure to mandate payment by employers of current salary levels as a top up, but it’s likely that this would occur anyway for skilled workers, and the whole point of the scheme is to extend rights that skilled workers already enjoy or have the bargaining power to access to all.
The baby bonus would be abolished and replaced with a $5000 parental allowance.
Working on the picture being worth a thousand words concept, Pundit Kitchen (from the ICHC team) encourages reader submissions. It does tend to lean leftish, which doesn’t bother me, but if it bothers you then leave a link to contrarian PolMacros in comments. Here follows an assortment (image heavy, so unfriendly to dial-up (sorry):
Social scientists can be a weird lot sometimes. The latest round of weirdness comes from the Lowy Institute, whose 2008 poll was released today, 8 weeks after the polling concluded. The official line on the climate change questions is that, “Economic considerations overtook tackling climate change as the most important foreign policy goal, but climate-related issues topped the list of threats to Australia”.
But you’d have to be employed at the Opposition Organ to take that kind of analysis at face value Continue reading ‘Lowy Poll 06 Redux?’
The Courier-Mail trumpets a Galaxy poll of Queenslanders on federal voting intentions:
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull a hit in Queensland
If you look at the tables, Labor is in a (slightly) better position on the two party preferred than it was in the federal election, on 51-49 in the state (the ALP’s 2PP in Queensland in November was 50.4%). And the Coalition’s primary vote has fallen by .5%.
But:
The fact that Labor’s advantage in the home state of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan could be eroded so quickly is likely to send shockwaves through the Federal Government.
Hardly.
All this is based on some improvement in the ratings on economic management (but with the Coalition still behind Labor). Last year, the Coalition had better poll numbers on economic management - and lost the election.
[Via Oz Politics]
Here we go again. From the Oz:
CRIMTRAC’s planned automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system could become a mass surveillance system, taking as many as 70 million photos of cars and drivers every day across a vast network of roadside cameras.
State and federal police forces want full-frontal images of vehicles, including the driver and front passenger, that are clear enough for identification purposes and usable as evidence in court.
But it gets better:
According to a privacy consultation paper issued in June, all ANPR data collected would be made available to participating agencies in real time, and retained for five years for future investigations.
The obvious retort to John McCain’s faux suspension of his campaign last week was that Presidents should be able to deal with more than one issue at the same time. That’s obviously true, but it’s also a truism which disguises something - politicians think that the public want their focus predominantly on the crucial issue of the moment (and the media reinforces this with its “narrative” obsession).
It might not have escaped folks’ attention that Kevin Rudd minimised his focus on climate change at the UN in favour of the plan he and Gordon Brown cooked up for saving the world’s finances. Rudd himself mentioned that it would be difficult to concentrate world leaders’ attention on climate change. This rhetoric also provided him with some convenient cover for disguising the switch in focus for the justification of his trip as it came under opposition attack. But it does raise the broader question of which way Kevin Rudd will jump on climate change and emissions trading - perhaps more in terms of the international negotiations (which however can’t be separated from the domestic politics, with the whole question of the significance and timing of Australia’s ETS being crucial to the “argy bargy”).
The Lowy Institute Poll being released today might pose some dangers ahead. Continue reading ‘Can politicians walk and chew gum at the same time?’
The details are a bit sketchy but it appears that agreement has been reached on some version of the Paulson bailout plan. Ian Welsh at Firedoglake, whose coverage of all these shenanigans has been first rate, has the lowdown on what it probably means.
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