Tag Archive for 'Energy'

Limits to growth?

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Consumerism, Economics, Energy, International, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 51 Comments

The New Economics Foundation in the UK has released a major report – Growth Isn’t Possible. The Foundation, whose motto is ‘economics as if people and the planet mattered’, questions whether exponential economic growth is possible in the face of the disjunction between its imperatives and the limits of the planet’s biocapacity. The authors, Andrew Simms and Victoria Johnson, observe that the language of orthodoxy and heresy is a significant one in economic discourse; among other things, I’d add, the political imperative to focus on redistribution rather than the justice of distribution (and thus the inequality inherent in capitalist society) itself constrains questioning. Yet the thesis that growth has its limits is the pure province of neither 70s faddism or heterodox Marxists. John Stuart Mill proposed in 1848:

… the increase in wealth is not boundless: that at the end of what they term the progressive state lies the stationary state.

The NEF report is summarised in this blog post by its co-author and the Foundation’s policy director, Andrew Simms. The report itself is clearly and well written, and marshals an impressive range of evidence and argument about the economics and politics of energy usage. It’s not a quick read, but I’d strongly urge a perusal of, at least, the introductory and concluding chapters. Many won’t want to have the debate it foresees about limits to growth, but it’s one I am sure will not go away.

The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Authoritarianism, Climate change, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, History, International, Politics, Religion, Sociology and Technology
. 146 Comments

One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.

Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:

A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.

Continue reading ‘The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary’

“Great new tax on everything”

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Climate change, Economics, Elections, Federal Elections, Howardia, Politics and Polls
. 54 Comments

The government has released modelling showing the effects of the CPRS on household incomes, demonstrating that many low income earners will, on average, be better off financially.

Predictably, this disclosure has added fuel to the fire of complaints from the right about its evils.

In the circles Tony Abbott moves in, redistribution is a dirty word.

That, of course, ignores the fact that everything governments do in tax, benefits, and allowances of whatever kind is redistributive. That includes all the Howard era tax/welfare transfers. It’s not as though Labor has some sort of evil socialist agenda and Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are socialist wolves in sheep’s clothing, much as some might like to entertain such fantasies.

It’s no doubt right to say, as Andrew Norton does, that Abbott’s shift in the Coalition’s position to opposition to the CPRS (matched with vague promises of costless emissions savings) exposes the detail of the ETS to more debate. That may not be a bad thing, though it would also be a good thing if its ineffectiveness in achieving its ostensible aims were the focus of the debate. That’s not likely to be the case in the headline election year debate, as Abbott’s move switches attention to hip pockets.

However, anyone who followed the design of the CPRS from the start would be well aware that the government had already anticipated this line of attack. Continue reading ‘“Great new tax on everything”’

After Copenhagen

Published
by
Mark
3 months ago
in Climate change, Developing world, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, Imperialism, International, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 39 Comments

In the wake of the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, we’re starting to see some more thoughtful analyses which go beyond the proximate causes of the imbroglio to gesture to more structural factors. Robert has already cited George Monbiot’s recent blog post.

I’d like to take a look at a couple of other articles. Naomi Klein, writing for The Guardian, argues that Barack Obama was at fault. Anticipating criticism about the difficulties of getting anything through the US Senate, she nevertheless claims that Obama missed several opportunities to put climate change response much higher on the agenda, at a time when he still had massive political capital. There’s a real sense in which this is true, but Klein doesn’t search for the underlying reasons why Obama has acted the way he has, which go beyond the reflex accusations of being a sell-out (‘triangulating wolf in the guise of a liberal sheep’, you know the drill).

We’ve all been somewhat misled by the Obama as Bush antidote theme. George W. Bush’s regime, in many ways, was the last gasp of an Imperial ideology of leading the free world, or of making war on bits of it to make them free. The collapse of the conjuring trick which was supposed to pay for all this, and the increasing realisation that the US couldn’t make its desire reality purely by will (expressed through military force and propaganda) determines the conjuncture which Obama inherited. There’s a tendency to look to him as if he will actually give flesh to the bones of the carcass of the myth of American benevolence. But, in fact, his task is managing America’s decline. Thus, his actual behaviour, as opposed to his flights of rhetoric, demonstrates that America is now a nation among nations, looking to protect its own national interest rather than project some sort of salvational salve for the world’s woes. That should have been evident from Copenhagen.

It’s important to look beyond the quotidian, and understand that the sands of political economy were actually shifting beneath the feet of the delegates and negotiators at COP. That also implies that assumptions about a future based on straight extrapolation from the position pre-Copenhagen may be as dangerous as the assumption that climate change is itself a linear process, rather than the interaction of many complex factors and systems, human and non-human. While I don’t necessarily accept all that he argues, that necessary perspective is well displayed by ecological economist Brian Davey, writing at Open Democracy. With permission, under a Creative Commons licence, I’ve reproduced his piece over the fold. It provides much food for thought, as we come to grips with our collective responsibility to shape the planet’s future.

[Please click through to the original article for hyperlinks and diagrams.]

Continue reading ‘After Copenhagen’

Markets as a solution to climate change: Epic Fail

Published
by
Mark
7 months, 1 week ago
in Economics, Energy, Environment and Markets
. 91 Comments

nzclimatechangepolicyIf anything ends up completely discrediting the worship of markets, it will probably turn out to be the vacuous and endlessly deferred nature of quasi-market “solutions” to climate change, which have little support even among those who are ideologically predisposed to them.

You’d assume that the free marketeers would be better off supporting something meaningful… if there was anything in the “rational actor” thing.

Image courtesy of No Right Turn.

How green was my budget?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
10 months, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Policy, Politics and Transport
. 88 Comments

If you judged by press releases, you’d reckon this was the greenest budget ever. And it is indeed good in parts, though not nearly as good as you might think. The first thing to note is that the CPRS targets and the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target haven’t changed, so emissions won’t change at all (though it may mean we buy fewer permits overseas), nor will the fraction of our electricity generated from renewable sources. What the funding in this budget might do is change the technology mix available to us to achieve those targets.

In the energy space, the big deal is a bunch of new funding for large-scale demonstration projects for both solar and geosequestration in comparable amounts – 1.5 billion over six years to the solar industry, 2 billion over nine years to geosequestration. John Hepburn at Rooted argues the value-for-money case for the solar investment, on the basis that the solar demonstration projects will deliver “…1GW of real, emissions free power within the next 6 years. Wheras the larger investment in CCS will support the development of demonstration projects over 9 years.” CCS research does indeed need to start poohing or be pushed off the government funding pot, but Hepburn is overselling the current state of the renewable energy sector. That 1GW of capacity might be “real” (if only delivered a few hours a day), but it will be very expensive, unreliable, and – until energy storage technology improves – only available when the sun shines, not when the power is wanted. Until these issues are sorted, the contribution of solar energy to Australia’s power grid will remain limited to little more than demonstration levels anyway. Incidentally, solar thermal is highly unlikely to ever be cheaper than Australian coal-fired power (ignoring externalities), because if the fuel is free and at the power plant, most of the rest of the cost is the steam turbine and generator. Guess what – a solar thermal plant needs the exact same steam turbine and generator.

In any case, for what it’s worth I strongly question the policy (as distinct from political) merits of singling out the solar industry for help. While my little investment, Geodynamics, has managed to bugger things up again, it’s just one of a number of alternative sources of renewable energy that can be turned on and off when required, not when the wind deigns to blow or the sun deigns to shine. Why not throw the money for demonstration projects open to the entire renewables sector and see what ideas turn up?

Continue reading ‘How green was my budget?’

How to live with emissions?

Published
by
dk.au
1 year, 7 months ago
in Climate change, Consumerism, Culture, Disasters, Energy, Ethics, Markets, Media and Sociology
. 19 Comments

WorleyParsons’ PR coup last week indicated a thirst for big interventions into an otherwise rather bleak energy policy landscape1. The ~$100k feasibility study regurgitated by the MSM (and analysed by Robert here) was, as Brian alluded to, chump change from their handsome profiteering from Canada crapping all over its Kyoto commitments under the Harper Government. It remains to be seen whether WP actually capitalises on its good press and goes ahead with the projects, or simply banks the warm and fuzzies and continues its search for business opportunities elsewhere. If the projects do progress beyond the speculative phase, it would raise some interesting questions around the diversification of a business like theirs into solar (rather than, for example, consolidating its interests in various carbon intensive fields). Continue reading ‘How to live with emissions?’

  1. Two particular stories stand out: (1) Australia’s main carbon capture collective, CO2CRC, flagged the need for an additional $300m to keep the ball rolling on their research; and, (2) In a move which underlines their uninsurability, Parliament moved on legislation to protect Carbon Capture and Storage projects should they leak (or damage lifeforms we have little to no understanding of) ↩[back]