Since we last looked at the Arctic ice coverage the equinox has been passed, the sun has set and the sea is icing up again quite nicely considering the ice loss fell just short of the 2007 record.
Tag Archive for 'climate change denialism'
There’s an extraordinary rant from Christopher Pearson in today’s Opposition Organ, beginning with a big spray against Quentin Bryce. Let me just observe that her opinion that the reserve powers can be codified is a respectable one, and that Pearson is committing a significant fallacy when he conflates that opinion with the analytically separate question of the political feasibility of such a change to the Constitution.
The actual occasion for his condescending twaddle seems to be a lamentation about the ideological unsoundness of the Liberal Party leadership:
Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine a candidate with Bryce’s limitations and ideological baggage winning the level of broad acceptance within the conservative wing of the political class necessary for her to function as governor-general. Indeed, since Brendan Nelson, Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull could not be described plausibly as conservatives, it may not be safe to assume that Bryce does enjoy that kind of acceptance. In less than a year, the values for which John Howard, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer provided so formidable a bulwark are no longer taken for granted in the Liberal Party room.
More power to Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott appears to be the suggestion. Yep, they’re electoral gold. Attack Rudd from the hard right, urges Pearson.
Continue reading ‘Governor-General “not especially bright”, columnist claims’
Back on July 18 Andrew Bolt said that we should “forget media scares about a melting North Pole”. As with almost everything he said in that article he was wrong. This graph from the National Snow and Ice Data Center shows how things are progressing:
The Fin Review reported yesterday that a host of resource company execs are descending on Canberra on Friday for a pow wow with Martin Ferguson. Initially this meeting was being presented as a way of circumventing the BCA, who released a doom and gloom laden report last week basically threatening a capital strike. But it’s now clear that it’s nothing of the sort, as Marn’s department have also sent the BCA an invite. Industry sources expressed pleasure at Ferguson’s involvement, telling the Fin that they found him easier to deal with and more amenable to their views than Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Hardly surprising…
Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday - that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Continue reading ‘Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two’
John Quiggin’s blog is on a temporary hiatus, which is a pity as I’d hoped he’d reproduce his article in the Financial Review today to enable it to reach a wider audience. Gary Sauer-Thompson summarises the gist of the article and offers some analysis of his own. Quiggin suggests that “the state of the Murray-Darling system is an indication of the price of ignoring climate change”. Quiggin argues that it’s been known since the 1980s that there was an urgent need to restore flows to the river system, and that the recent proposals have both been inadequate and indeed unable to be implemented because there simply isn’t enough water. The impact of the drought is such that releasing any flows from upstream - say from Cubbie Station in Queensland - would largely be a futile exercise as it’s estimated that 80% would be lost by evaporation or absorption into the water table. What we’re left with - in the absence of any real ameliating action and non-existent or very low flows into the lower part of the Murray from 2002 onwards - is the current choice between one ecological disaster and another worse one with regard to Lake Albert and Lake Alexandrina near the mouth of the Murray River.
All this implies that the cabinet decision today to spend an additional $50 million on purchasing water rights in the northern basin is futile. It really just compensates those irrigators whose allocations were the problem in the past for the rents foregone. It also suggest The Greens are also wrong in suggesting that there is a lifeline from releasing flows which would prove to be insufficient.
Quiggin concludes:
The desparate choices now facing us with respect to the Murray-Darling basin are a small indication of what we will face if the world fails to act quickly to control emissions of carbon dioxide and slow the rate of global warming. Sooner or later the necessity for action will become undeniable, but by then the relatively easy options available now will have been forclosed.
Instead of market-friendly options like emissions trading, we will be looking at command-and-control measures like the water restrictions now prevailing in most Australian cities. As far as the environment goes, the kind of triage operations now being applied to the icon sites of the Murray will be routine. Some vital ecosystems will be saved, at the cost of abandoning others.
Continue reading ‘Market based solutions and global warming: how viable for how long?’
If you read between the lines of Peter Costello’s in house columnist/propagandist at News Limited Glenn Milne’s column today, and add in Tony Abbott’s words of praise for The Great Pretender on Lateline on Friday, and the story that came from “nowhere” about Cossie knocking back a 2 million buck a year job, the Liberal leadership narrative is becoming pretty clear - signals are being sent that the party’s Right, and particularly Nick Minchin, want $weetie in the leadership.
But let’s be clear about two things:
(1) Costello is still doing his usual petulant thing - signalling that he’ll only take the leadership if asked. Whether or not a 10 month sulk while his party lies in smoking ruins is a mark of a clever politician or just a massive and self-centred ego is - as they say - a question for the party room.
(2) The Liberal Party right are turning to Costello in order to fend off Malcolm Turnbull. So any suggestion that the former Treasurer is some sort of moderate, or indeed that he might have his own agenda, can probably be put to bed. He’ll be the captive of the denialist hardliners just like Brendan Nelson is. And that - all his past feints to the moderates aside - would be entirely consistent with his history as a politician - a natural right winger, but a lazy one with few ideas of his own, and no eye for political strategy. Turnbull is unlikely to take any second coming lying down.
While it’s reasonable to ask, as Lyn at Public Opinion does, whether tracing every twist and turn of the opposition’s twisted trajectory towards some sort of agreed position on an emissions trading scheme, is to pay too much attention to a “policy cycle of sometimes less than 24 hours [which stretches] the notion of novelty a little far.” However, it could also be suggested that the interest lies in watching the moment that a “media narrative” switches, and as with the Costello crud, observing the process of constructing one, as a few bits and pieces of disconnected nonsense get tied together by assorted columnists and reporters and woven into a new thread that will then become - hey presto! - conventional wisdom, dignified as such on Sundays by the usual Insider suspects. You can shine a light on the way the press gallery mob do “the wisdom of crowds each other” by building a story arc, which then shapes the way the story is moved on.
Brendan Nelson’s office is denying reports - discussed on an earlier post - that he will be having a “showdown” with Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt over the Coalition’s stance on emissions trading.
Some were reporting yesterday that Nelson would next week “take on” Malcolm Turnbull over climate change. His office claims that is “nonsense” and, given his tenuous hold on the leadership, it does seem unlikely he would be seeking a showdown with anyone. But he and Turnbull are “consulting”, which suggests he is trying to inch the party as far as he can towards a more sceptical line, in a bid to keep everyone happy.
However, Nelson is apparently “negotiating” with Turnbull to “harden” the Coalition’s position, and in an attempt to keep the denialists in his ranks happy, came out with this gem:
Now Nelson’s rhetoric is sounding more sceptical again. “I see there is an emerging body of scientific opinion which questions the role of carbon in all of this, but I’m strongly of the view that we give the planet the benefit of the doubt,” he said yesterday.
Sure, scientists differ about the degree and speed of global warming, but if it is not caused by carbon, why on earth are we contemplating support for an emissions trading scheme at all?
Quite. And that difference is between more catastrophic and slightly less catastrophic outlooks. Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy II’
Tim Watts has posted at Tree of Knowledge on Andrew Bolt’s claim that the forces of the hardline right in the Liberal Party are planning to monster Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt and push for an oppositional stance to the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme. Brendan Nelson’s latest confused comments about delaying the ETS might be some confirmation of this, but on the other hand Nelson’s line on climate change is a moveable feast at the best of times, and Turnbull was singing from the same song sheet today. Watts is no doubt right that such a stance would be political stupidity on the part of the opposition, but it’s just as likely that the story represents wishful thinking on Bolt’s part, obsessed as he is with climate change denialism. However, nutty calls from the Nats for a Royal Commission to examine the science certainly do highlight the continuing divisions within the Coalition.
We’reThey’re all neo-liberals now?The think tank culture is weird. Although there are certainly think tanks around that put some effort into commissioning and fostering quality research, the origin of the beast lay in the business of shaping and shifting public debate through the media and influencing pollies. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it were, provided that we understand that the research produced may not always be peer-reviewed (CPD, with whom I’m associated, does subject its policy papers to peer review) and in particular we understand not just the ideological commitments of individual think tanks but where their funding comes from. That’s why there are legitimate questions to be asked - including but not restricted to the propensity to push climate change denialism - about the reluctance of some organisations such as Gerard Henderson’s Sydney Institute to even admit that disclosure of funding sources is in the public interest.
Because one of the things think tanks do is provide a ready source of op/ed copy, so-called “public debate” can go down some quite odd paths. Most recently, in Australia, the bizarre theme about the Enlightenment (and apparently the “good” Scottish Enlightenment as opposed to the “bad” French Enlightenment) which was articulated to climate change denialism, and which also prompted some public weirdness from Craig Emerson. It’s noteworthy that just as the Rudd v. Hayek wars are really just proxies for a dispute about underlying policy orientations, that none of the gibberish that has come out of the new MSM meme of the month has anything much to do with scholarly study on the role of the actual Enlightenments in history or in philosophy. It’s not really a “battle of ideas” at all, just a convenient hook for some very tired positions to be hung on.
But everyone in this game - “progressive” or “liberal” or “conservative” - has a vested interest in pretending that what is being staged is some sort of “battle of ideas”. Hence we have Per Capita, a particularly neo-liberal bunch of progressives with strong connections to some of the Blairite Third Way orgs in London, holding a “Consilium”, whatever that may be, accepting most of the premises of the CIS’ Enlightenment-fest. And we get PC fellow Dennis Glover writing an op/ed for The Australian spruiking his mob’s definition of Kevin Rudd’s “reforming Centre”. The new ideas in question (and the PC’s website features slogans such as “Hard Decisions”, “Human Capital” and “Practical, Empirical, Fresh” demonstrating their desire to be the house intellectuals of the Rudd revolution) aren’t actually new. It’s all standard “social democracy = markets + human capital theory + communitarian welfare policy” Blairism. It’s just getting a run in Australia for the first time, and there’s no doubt that it is getting a run - with initiatives such as the marketisation of Victorian TAFE and Julia Gillard’s musings about vouchers being directly linked to this agenda. And the “truancy welfare quarantining” seems quite redolent of Blair’s first term - when backbenchers revolted over welfare cuts. And, as argued here recently, there’s evidence that this sort of thing misses the point in addressing the actual causes of poor school attendance.
Continue reading ‘
We’reThey’re all neo-liberals now?’