7.0 – magnitude of the January 12 Earthquake
Update: 14: the number of deaths from a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Los Angeles where there a building codes, including those for earthquake resistance, and they’re actually enforced (via).
1593 – number of days since I’ve felt a spine-chilling feeling of descent into a Hobbesian state after hearing pleas for help. Only this time, it’s because
“Parliament has collapsed,” President Préval was quoted as saying. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”
520 000: the number of $10 donations to the US Red Cross via SMS
1000: patients already treated by Medicins Sans Frontier, which has an inflatable hospital on the way. (Donate to MSF Australia here)
2: percentage of Haitians who stay in school beyond Grade 5 (h/t: Tyler Cowen)
1755: year of Lisbon Earthquake, a key catalyst of Enlightenment and conceptions of Natural Disaster.
Appeals:
AVAAZ: Stand with the people: 100% of funds to go to relief and reconstruction
Oxfam: Haiti Earthquake Appeal
PLAN: Haiti Earthquake Appeal
Update: Chris Blattman asks, ‘what is better than giving money?’ lobbying the US government to grant Haitians Temporary Protected Status.
Tyler Cowen: “… Very rapidly, President Obama needs to come to terms with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.”
Copenhagen was locked down as Obama fled after essentially putting nothing new on the table, and leaving the signing ceremony to an aide. Basically the Danish COP President had to pull some 25 ‘representative’ countries aside to break the deadlock. The Conference is about to go to back into plenary to discuss the ‘accord’ they came up with. There should be jostling on monitoring, reporting and verification clauses of the climate accord, but the headline messages are pretty well established: 2 degrees, the promise to establish a panel to look into financing and meta-aspirations on brave new acronyms like ‘NAMAs’. When quizzed on what was new in the Accord – 2 degrees and figures on financing were established well before Copenhagen – the Swedish EU President just told press that “We have been fighting not to go backwards.”
Update 3:34am: Tuvalu, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba immediately oppose accord. Looks like no deal after all.
3:41am: Rasmussen again proves his incompetence in controlling proceedings. All the plenary members are laughing at him. Looks like Ed Milliband picked it.
Update [by MB]: John Quiggin’s verdict.
Update 2 [by BB]: The final text of the Copenhagen Accord.
I’ve just posted a piece at New Matilda’s COPThis! blog adding some historical context and detail to the Land Use loopholes reported in the Fairfax Press by Guy Pearse and Greg Borschmann, as well as the ‘Hot Air’ loophole Peter Wood has been carefully keeping track of.
And on a somewhat related note – some colleagues, led by the aptly named Regina Betz, are running the Copenhagen Prediction Market. It’s just for fun and research, but they’ve launched a loopholes prediction market to try to capture new announcements as they come to light. You can register from anywhere and it’s free to participate. Continue reading ‘Hot Air and Landuse Loopholes in Copenhagen’
Arguably the biggest gambit of price theorists attempting to upscale their successes with small, well defined pollution rights trading schemes is that the economy/politics boundary in allocating permits can be located empirically. In the well ordered Popperian world of (neo)liberal economics, the lurching forth of experiment after experiment showed (after Montgomery’s foundational 1972 formal proof) that the allocation of free permits doesn’t effect the efficacy of the policy instrument. From tradeable fishing quotas to Acid Rain, the victors affected closure of the problem of allocation, at least inside the policy beltway of Washington and the EPA. From these (very real) successes, a cadre of policy acolytes in Canberra, Oslo, Wellington and other far flung locations spruiked the seductively simple model of (1) setting caps, (2) throwing out permits in accordance with the regular political process and (3) let the newly empowered and ‘calculatively endowed’ actors (fishermen, power plant managers etc.) decide for themselves about how to reach their goals. Emissions trading working groups were formed in the 1990s to refine recommendations. Even the Aussie Greenhouse Office released working papers. Fast forward to 2009 and economic pundits who have built careers on quantity instruments (eg. Robert Stavins) are fervently, even forcefully, spruiking their successes to methodically advocate emissions trading as the primary climate policy instrument.
Arguments about the first bit of the model, targets (1), fell off the front pages last year once the hubbub of Kevin taking the helm to deliver the Green Paper died down; so the transition to parts (2), allocation, and (3) regulatory institutions (in the broadest sense) is well underway. Which is all a roundabout way of saying Steven Bright has an wonderfully evocative, well grounded piece on the calculated, mundane, discursive violence that has characterized the CPRS negotiations:
Australia’s CPRS is barely breathing while a crowd of experts are milling around to snatch essential organs before death. Electricity wants a kidney; coal will settle for a lung; mining, maybe the eyes; farming wants a left foot; forestry, manufacturing, transport, everybody wants a piece of it.
Bright goes on to give examples of firms that are caught on the wrong side of the ‘two track‘ carbon pricing regime who can only peer across with rage to “where business-as-usual, profligate subsidies and penalties for innovation” are clicking along nicely thanks to the networks of influence Guy Pearse has documented so admirably. But what’s really going on here? Should we be disappointed, or even surprised? Continue reading ‘CPRS Rage’
Today’s Fin led with the news that the upturn in consumer spending has put pressure on the market in RECs, whose price is a kind of scoreboard for the renewable industry cage match initiated under the Howard Government. Rudd’s reforms, discussed previously, saw the inclusion of solar hot water and ‘phantom’ PV certificates, however this effectively destroyed any pretense that a certificate represented a ‘real’ megawatt-hour. Continue reading ‘REC Market inundated with consumer credits’
If Mad Max 2 was the Sistine Chapel of Punk as J.G. Ballard once quipped, then perhaps the Last Judgement is at hand! George Miller is going to commence pre-production of Mad Max 4 immediately in NSW. I’m guessing he’s taking a punt on the state most likely to provide, erm, free extras; what with rivers running dry and planning incompetence running rife. Add a liquid fuel disruption and we’ll see who has the last laugh…
A terrific video tribute to the first Maxes set to Motorhead’s Ace of Spades is below the jump. Parental supervision recommended for those easily offended by car accidents
(via Simon Sellars) Continue reading ‘Mad Max 4 to Rescue NSW Government or vice versa’
Update: Andrew Hunter from NineMSN has responded below, stating that the image was not sourced from my site and removed it from the original article in response to my assertion of copyright.
I think it’s great that your organisation has taken a firm stand on piracy (“the unauthorized reproduction or use of a copyrighted book, recording”) over the years. I understand that us Generation Y-ers are “vulnerable to piracy as many do not perceive it as a crime”.
But we have more in common that you think. When the latest fad/story comes around, we both like to be across it as soon as possible – the quick download seems perfectly innocent. After all, what difference will it make? Continue reading ‘Dear NineMSN,’
Projects to be credited with RECs under 'Business as Usual' scenario
It’s fair to say it’s been a lobbyists’ feeding frenzy in Canberra lately. Here’s all you need to know about the Renewable Energy Target in the same sense that all you need to know about emissions trading is that it’s going to cost 45 000 jobs in the EITE Industries. Under Larvatus Prodeo Equilibrium Modelling we can authoritatively inform you that the red part of the pie, representing actual renewable energy, will be 5% wind power and 13% Residential and 7% other PV, which are both now competing with each other.
Continue reading ‘Blood in the water: RET Edition’
What’s a Carbon Trust? Why it’s the Pommy genesis of such radical, climate saving, innovative grants as a £198,910 research subsidy to replace spark plugs with a laser:
Unlike the venerable sparkplug ignition system, which fires just one or at best two sparks right next to the combustion chamber roof, it is possible to ‘aim’ a laser ignition system to ignite the fuel anywhere in the combustion chamber, therefore focusing the beam where the fuel is most concentrated.
Exhibit B: The Hogsmill Tavern Refurbishment. There’s got to be something about this kind of pissweak QUANGO to piss off everyone: Conservatives and various stripes of economic rationalists (so few grants would pass a cost-benefit analysis), Libertarians (moral interventions into the economy) and Greens (propping up unsustainable technologies with greenwash). Continue reading ‘Robert Hill to head Australian Carbon Trust’
Three continents, two energy markets, two stories. Brian covered the first here, of which the emoting continues apace. The second is far more interesting.
Yesterday, 12 European companies signed a 400 billion euro (560 billion dollar) initiative to built huge solar thermal power plants in Africa and the Middle East. Munich Re, Deutsche Bank and Siemens are among the corporate giants that will form the consortium Desertec. By 2050, the solar farms may provide up to 15 percent of Europe’s electricity needs and a substantial portion of the power needs of the producer countries with carbon-free power.
Will Davies pings the cultural boundaries around this project via some mad French pornographer called Georges Bataille, no less, to rethink notions of ‘economy’ from the ground up…. or should that be, from the sun, down Continue reading ‘After energy markets’
So Woodside, Rio and Boral have responded to the Australian Conservation Foundation and Australian Climate Justice Program complaint to the ACCC about the yawning gap between the shrillness of public emoting and disclosures to the investment community, which increased even as the emos won greater concessions at each stage of the process. The EITEs have won some $16.4bn of public money in concessions at last count. That is an extraordinary amount of public money being handed over to pad their profitability: about 19 000 new buses, to take the Rooze’s benchmark, or 455 time-wasting, subjectively measured ‘energy savings’ schemes.
Rio Tinto’s response, that they’re not ‘battling’ a global emissions trading scheme, is laughable. How do they honestly expect a national – let alone global – scheme to gain traction if everyone keeps undercutting it? Business commentary, from the most hackneyed pining for a fanciful, counterfactual world free of political machinations (Carbontaxalia?) to more orthodox defences of industry have questioned the EITE concessions. eg. Electricity Supply Industry Apparatchik Keith Orchison has noted that, “… firms are hardly going to play up the negatives to the investment community, particularly as the legislation is still a moving playing field. However, as the analysts all read the papers, surely they must be asking these companies about their public utterances – how one wonders does the rest of that conversation go?”
One does indeed. The cut and thrust of the complaint is that with such a thoroughly impotent carbon price now firmly on the table, companies have an obligation under s52 of the Trade Practices Act to, well, make ‘the rest of that conservation’ redundant. The key issue for the ACCC will be whether the Statements ‘were made in trade or commerce’ or bear such a character. The complaint alleges that the statements were absolutely core to these businesses. Indeed, they were instrumental in delaying the scheme, increasing compensation etc. Continue reading ‘“It’s not like we’re battling it” Part I – EITEs’
John Hepburn was the only one who noticed Labor burying the Wilkins Review in budget media releases. It’s becoming increasingly clear why it was buried. The CPRS discussion has thus far failed on its own terms to “change … relative prices [by providing] businesses and consumers with incentives to adjust their behaviour, invest in low-emissions technologies and help Australia reduce emissions.” As Giles Parkinson noticed in the transcript from the Senate Climate Policy [pdf] hearing to get the various stakeholders’ reactions to the changes announced by the government, the handouts are settled – and have been since at least last July when Citi released their first report on ‘likely impacts’:
“My mainstream fund manager clients are generally taking the view that, having established that the likely impact of the scheme on [heavy industry eg. aluminium, steel, cement, paper, LNG, chemicals and mining] is small, they do not need to be continually updated,” she told the committee.
“They are actually getting a bit bored with it. Most fund managers I speak to are pretty sanguine, feeling that the impact of the CPRS will be small given the number of free permits that will be allocated. They feel that other influences like commodity prices, exchange rates and the state of the global economy are more important to their investment
They’re not just bored of it because of the quantity of emoting, but because it’s completely empty rhetoric: Continue reading ‘Carbon price taking a back seat’
With all eyes on the Liberals’ response to the New(TM) CPRS, it’s worth noting that Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader on Emissions Trading Design Andrew “climate change is the cause celebre that lefties siezed on after the fall of communism” Robb released the Pearce Report last week, and what a trooper for doing it. As if their association with skeptic loons wasn’t enough of a blow to their credibility, the report reads like it was written quickly. Very quickly. And it’s not just the spelling mistakes that make me say that, but the feeble contribution to the substantive climate policy debate it offers. Continue reading ‘The Pearce Review – the Liberals’ CPRS Report’
Here’s an interesting sign of things to come. Loy Yang Power has bought 100 000 Certified Emissions Reductions in a pre-emptive strike on regulation of the electricity market under the CPRS. Two points worth making: this is a drop in the ocean (no pun intended) compared to the annual emissions of the power stations of ~14m tonnes. Also, the US Waxman Bill would only credit 4 from every 5 international offset credits imported into the country to cover compliance. This is largely because independent analyses of the CDM have come up with figures ranging from 20% to 50% of all projects approved being ‘non-additional’ – they would have happened anyway without funding. Continue reading ‘Loy Yang Power buys carbon offsets’
LP Reports, Policy makers listen! By way of a follow up to this post, I attended an ‘Energy White Paper Consultation’ workshop and can report that the Dept of RET facilitator stated that “the composition of the High Level Consultative Committee is a mistake!” They actually intended to have some token renewable energy representatives to lend an air of legitimacy to the whole exercise. Unfortunately, when said CEO realised what they were getting themselves into, they pulled out quick smart, leaving the poor RET exposed. Continue reading ‘Energy. It’s NOT JUST what you dig out of the ground?’
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