First it was Rupert Murdoch “The planet deserves the benefit of the doubt.”, then Peter Costello on Insiders
I think the ground is changing. I think it is important that we bring new countries into this discussion. And I think, from Australia’s point of view, if the world starts moving towards a carbon trading system, we can’t be left out of that, that Australia has a role…
and now John Howard
JOHN HOWARD has yielded to pressure to consider a global carbon trading scheme, and business leaders say they are ready to take action against global warming.
As Brian has noted below, the release of the Stern review has coincided with a sudden shift in the political direction with respect to AGW policy. Previously the Australian government position has been completely intransigent on being involved with carbon trading, but with Peter Costello’s interview on Insiders and now this announcement it seems there has been a large shift in government opinion. Even if this is not a complete reversal it is a serious concession that Australia and the rest of the world needs to do more.
Earlier in the year the government used a review of the tax system as a stepping stone on the way to reversing its previously stated opposition to cutting top tax rates. Here’s hoping this review is the same, a facing saving exercise before a policy reversal and not just more hot air.
There have been a few interesting pieces around recently on the subject of carbon emissions trading. The first is The Economist (subscription only) noting some of the failures of the European carbon trading market, which has seen prices of CO2 emissions collapse due to the issuing of too many free permits.
In order to get industry to swallow this scheme, allowances were handed out free to companies, rather than being (as economists wanted) auctioned. In power-generation (Europe’s most-polluting industry) companies passed the price of carbon credits on to customers and pocketed the value of the allowances. According to a report by IPA Energy Consulting, Britain’s power-generators alone made a profit of around £800m ($1.5 billion) from the scheme in its first year.
As the article notes, this failure is not a reason to rubbish the idea of emission markets altogether, but it is a good lesson in the mistakes that can be made and the need to either slash the number of permits or auction them off if the scheme is going to be worthwhile.
Continue reading ‘Carbon Emissions Trading’
In December last year, my wife gave birth to our first child. I could tell you what a wonderful rewarding experience it is (and it is), but I’m not going to.
Instead I want to talk about the joy of low expectations that society places upon you as a father. I never realised that being a “good dad� was so easy. Pushing a pram up the street I have beaming old ladies tell me how wonderful it is that men are involved with the children, and that their husband would never have been seen pushing a pram. Change a nappy at my grandparents place and I hear about how fantastic it is that I help out.
It’s not just my grandparent’s generation that have this attitude. It is also clear from those in my parents or even my some of my own generation that they regard a father willing to help out with the general child raising chores an exception rather than the rule. I’ve worked with very proud Dads who would always talk of what their multiple children were up to, but admitted to having changed around three nappies in their lives. Its not that they weren’t interested in their children, it was merely that they didn’t help with the less pleasant chores.
Of course I don’t do as much as my wife does with the baby, I work and she doesn’t now. Still when I’m home I try to take a fair share of the child care chores. I don’t consider this exceptional but obviously it is. So all I can say to the generations of lazy bastards out there is, thanks for making it so easy to look like a good dad.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen microcredit bank which he founded.
Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries. Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. Grameen Bank has been a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.
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Micro-credit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. Economic growth and political democracy can not achieve their full potential unless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with the male.
The Nobel Peace Prize has had a sketchy history with some of the candidates sometimes seeming to have started as many wars as they’ve stopped, but in this case it seems like a very deserved award.
Its common to portray large multinational corporations as selfishly concerned with the bottom line and willing to trample over environmental and ethical concerns in the quest for the dollar. So I’ve been interested to read some people solidly on the left/environmental side make the point that this ignores the fact that they are also often exposed to disproportionately large risks to their reputation, which may make them behave more ethically than their smaller regional counterparts who don’t face the same scrutiny.
Peter Singer in his book The Ethics Of What We Eat, gives qualified support for McDonalds over most small take away food companies on the basis of their higher ethical standards. This article in The Guardian sums up the essence of his message:
Singer’s arguments are a challenge to knee-jerk antiglobalisation campaigners for whom McDonald’s is an unmitigated evil. Trapped in a small town and forced to choose an independent takeaway or the golden arches, Singer would plump for the latter (as his book points out, in the US, McDonald’s has insisted its eggs come from hens given more space than the legal minimum, among other “ethical” innovations). “The fact that a big chain has a national and international reputation to protect means they need to be a bit more cautious about what they are doing than someone who has no brand and is not going to suffer from any kind of disclosure,” he says.
Similarly Jared Diamond wrote in his book Collapse that some large mining companies were much more ethical in their behaviour than smaller companies were. Small mining companies may not outlast their mine and go broke leaving a large mess for the public to clean up. Larger companies with reputation and on going business to protect may perform better on ethical and environmental grounds, cleaning up messes and generally putting considerable effort into minimizing environmental impact.
Continue reading ‘Is big more ethical than small?’
It deserves mention that an Australian, Terence Tao has won the Fields Medal for mathematics becoming the first Australian to win the prize. Up to four Fields Medals are handed out once every four years, and it is the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
AT THE age of two, Terence Tao could already add up and subtract using the magnetic numbers his parents stuck on the fridge.
At eight, he scored better than 99 per cent of 17-year-old prospective university students on an international aptitude test for mathematics.
The Adelaide-born prodigy was appointed a professor at 24, and now, at 31, has become the first Australian to win a Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel prize.
The award was presented in Madrid yesterday by Spain’s King Juan Carlos I at a congress attended by 4000 international mathematicians.
Its a bit difficult to work out what exactly he won it for as the Medal is awarded for a body of work not a specific piece of work. His website states a fairly broad area of mathematical interest, although it is suggested here that:
It is awarded for a body of work rather than a single achievement but Professor Tao is most recently celebrated for showing, with Ben Green of Cambridge, that there are long strings of prime numbers a constant distance apart, work that is important for the coding of information such as banking details.
Well done Terence.
Continue reading ‘Australian wins the Fields Medal’
It seems that the suggestion that people should take responsibility for their own impact on global warming has made Clive Hamilton chuck a wobbly and write rather a nasty op-ed.
The answer is that Flannery’s book does not make life harder for the Government, but sends the sort of message the Government wants us to hear.
Flannery is an advocate of individual consumer action as the answer to environmental problems. Instead of being understood as a set of problems endemic to our economic and social structures, we are told we each have to take personal responsibility for our contribution to every problem.
…
This is music to the Government’s ears. The assignment of individual responsibility is consistent with the economic rationalist view of the world, which wants everything left to the market, even when the market manifestly fails.
Yet it is at best a naive, and at worst a reckless, approach to the looming catastrophe of climate change. The world did not eliminate the production of ozone-depleting substances by relying on the good sense of consumers in buying CFC-free fridges. We insisted governments negotiate an international treaty that banned CFCs. We did not invite car buyers to pay more to install catalytic converters, the greatest factor in reducing urban air pollution. We called on government to legislate to require all car makers to include them.
The idea that individuals should take some responsibility and that we should consider nuclear power has annoyed Clive Hamilton. Apparently Tim Flannery has lost sight of the main game of opposing the government as opposed to actually fighting global warming. As such saying anything the government may like is wrong, even if it is true.
Continue reading ‘Howard’s trump card?’
Today, the last two of the four NAB rogue traders involved in the $360 million foreign exchange loss were sentenced by the Victorian County Court. The head of the desk Luke Duffy and Senior trader Gianni Gray had already pleaded guilty and been sentenced to 29 months, and 16 months jail respectively. David Bullen and Vince Ficarra chose to fight the charges with Bullen representing himself, and much like in the classic game theory problem, suffered the higher penalties for fighting. Bullen receiving a 44 month sentence, and Ficarra 28 months.
What possessed Ficarra and Bullen to fight the charges is beyond me. Ficarra being the junior, in his first job, working for a group noted for their bullying behaviour had ample mitigating circumstances. These might have, if he had pleaded guilty and shown contrition saved him a custodial sentence, or at the very least got a very much lighter sentence than what he received. Trying to fight the charges in the face of taped evidence of them discussing lying to back office seems the sheerest folly. He may have been junior but he clearly knew what he was doing was wrong. In the end Ficarra received just one month less than the leader of the group, perhaps part of the all or nothing risk attitude that got them into trouble in the first place.
The other thing that gets me about this, is why did everyone else get off for free? Sure a number lost jobs, but that hardly reflects the fact that the negligence in every area of letting this go was so breathtakingly extreme as to be unbelievable. While the fake trades may not have been discovered until too late, lots of other behaviour was completely out of the bounds of any reasonable trading activity and was clearly a target for further investigation.
Continue reading ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’
The Sydney Morning Herald has run reports for two days in a row on the imposition of congestion taxes on the CBD and other parts of the city. Today there are two stories and an editorial. The first article yesterday, seemed to indicate that an RTA study had indicated popular support for the idea of imposing one on the city, but the main piece today seemed to suggest the opposite.
Most disappointing was Eric Roozendaal the NSW Roads minister ruling it out, not because its unnecessary but because:
“This market research survey from six years ago did not indicate Sydneysiders would support a congestion tax and I can categorically rule it out,” he said.
“The RTA and Government are constantly looking at ways to improve traffic flows through the building of better road infrastructure and better traffic management.”
The problem with this being that, in general, improving flows merely increases the numbers of cars using the road and in pretty short time we have the same problem again.
Continue reading ‘Congestion Tax’
Brian mentioned in a recent thread it would be good to hear more about Hot Rocks as a power source. While we hear a lot about nuclear and wind power solving our energy needs it seems that geothermal energy is decidedly unsexy. One of the basic problems with the electricity supply is the need for 24 hour base load power generation. Currently Hydro is the main contender for a renewable base load source, but in a dry continent its scope is limited. Biofuels are another possibility but have generally been seen to be too expensive.
Probably the most promising renewable base load solution is geothermal energy. The first geothermal electricity plant was constructed in 1904 in Italy. These plants used hydrothermal power, relying on underground aquifers venting steam or high-pressure hot water to the surface. There is some potential for this in Australia and there is a limited amount of electricity currently generated by this method in Birdsville, Queensland.
There are other Australian schemes for harnessing Geothermal power which are currently being investigated. Over the past few years a number of Australian companies have listed on the stock exchange with their primary goal being to explore and tap hot dry rocks. These are based around the idea of injecting water into rocks kilometres below the surface and extracting the superheated high-pressure water coming back out to drive generators.
Continue reading ‘Hot Rocks’
Over the weekend, ANSTO released a report into nuclear power generation. A summary has been available for some time stating the main points, but different media outlets have had different takes on it.
For example, The Australian “Subsidies or Kyoto essential for nuclear power“. The ABC reported it differently “Nuclear power economically viable: ANSTO”. The Sydney Morning Herald had a more parochial take “East coast would host nuclear plants: ANSTO”, but goes on to say:
An ANSTO report, released yesterday, found nuclear power would be competitive with gas- or coal-fired electricity - but only if taxpayers helped to pay for it or shouldered the risk of producing it.
Ah, yes. Well most things are economically viable if subsidised enough.
While I love my ABC and all that, is it too Tim Blair of me to point out the irony that it is the ABC that doesn’t consider needing subsidies to be viable, uneconomic? Another thing, why, when the report is freely available on the web, do none of the mainstream media put a link to it in their web articles so we can read it for ourselves?
Continue reading ‘The many readings of the ANSTO report’
The federal government has pulled out of the Snowy Hydro privatisation refusing to sell their 13% stake. Citing its iconic status the PM said.
There is, for whatever combination of reasons, there is overwhelming feeling in the community that the Snowy is an icon, it’s part of the great saga of post world War II development in Australia,” he said.
“It conjures many stories of tens of thousands of European migrants coming and blending with each other and in the process of working on the Snowy becoming part of this country. And people feel that.
“I have listened to that, and it is important that on occasions a government have both the courage and the willingness to change its mind on something.”
This is in contrast to his statements earlier this week saying:
“I understand the concerns that have been expressed and I acknowledge that this is probably an issue where, on the surface, a majority of public opinion would oppose what is being done by the three governments,” he said.
“I think the legal basis for what we’re doing is pretty sound and I’m not disposed, and the Government’s not disposed, to change our position.”
So now we have the strange position where the ALP supports privatisation while the Liberal party opposes it. I wonder, is the federal government’s real concern the iconic status, or is it the National party’s concern about ongoing irrigation rights west of the ranges.
Update: In the time I took to write this Iemma has pulled the plug. The whole thing has been canned.
“The prime minister has pulled the rug out from under the sale,” Mr Iemma told reporters. “The circumstances are significantly changed.
“The commonwealth decision makes it extremely difficult for NSW to proceed.”
I have a problem with the nuclear power debate in Australia, and it isn’t a problem with nuclear power. I’m pretty much in agreement with Tim Flannery that the threats posed by global warming are so much greater than the risks involved with nuclear power and that the option of using it should be very much on the table.
Instead my problem with the debate is that it seems to be about whether we should use nuclear power, not whether we should consider nuclear power as an option. This is missing an important point. As even the uranium industry admit
Coal is, and will probably remain, economically attractive in countries such as China, the USA and Australia with abundant and accessible domestic coal resources as long as carbon emissions are cost-free.
As it stands nuclear power isn’t really an economic option in Australia. It’s just not a cost effective way of producing power compared with the other options.
Continue reading ‘My problem with the nuclear power debate’
Rafe Champion at Catallaxy promotes the work of Peter Bauer in a recent series of articles about the failure of developmental aid. James Farrell at Club Troppo has written a interesting response and survey of the economic literature on the effects of foreign aid. Well worth a read and an interesting rejoinder to those who would argue that foreign aid achieves nothing.
Dutch politician and activist for the rights of Muslim women Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is having her Dutch citizenship revoked.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician and outspoken critic of Islam, said on Tuesday she was leaving parliament and the Netherlands after hearing she may be stripped of her citizenship for lying to win asylum.
Hirsi Ali, a friend of murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh, said she was resigning after Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk, a member of her own VVD liberal party, told her she might lose her Dutch passport because she lied on her asylum application
It appears that she was what our government would describe as a “economic migrant�, having not sought asylum in the first country that she fled to.
Hirsi Ali, whose real name is Hirsi Magan, pretended she had come to the Netherlands from war-torn Somalia, rather than via Kenya and Germany. Refugees are usually required to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach after fleeing.
Continue reading ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali’
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