… 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.

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.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is exemplary here. Throughout the fifth century, the distinction between Romans and barbarians is sharpened, the ideology of Roma Aeterna hyperbolised, even as the Empire’s military power begins to depend more and more on Ostrogothic armies to play off against other militarised populations in movement. The seat of power is the site not of stability, but of vicious contestation. Then, one day, Odoacer topples the house of cards, and takes power himself, without bothering to erect the screen of another puppet Emperor. Suddenly, the illusion is shattered, and the situation can be seen – in retrospect – in its true light. The Real reveals itself. (An apocalypse, properly understood, is a mode of veiling and unveiling a truth.)

Historians identify a number of points where action could have been taken – as late as the 460s – which may have prevented this. History, after all, is contingent, and events only appear necessary in retrospect. But what was blocking such action was precisely the inability to see and conceptualise the processes occurring as anything other than contingent and passing.

At the same time, particularly after the sack of Rome in 410, apocalyptic predictions were in the air.

For Žižek, transformations are at work which call forth such a doubled effect:

If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times. It is easy to see how each of the three processes… refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives… At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near”.

So there is no surprise that such profound tendencies towards paradigmatic change in the conditions of being human in the world call forth the twin ideological effects of blinkered conservatism and apocalyptic endism. In Žižek’s mind, there are four types of the latter: Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism and secular ecologism.

Note that Žižek is not employing the concept of apocalypticism pejoratively. The apocalyptic is a mode of experiencing time, and it may be, that confronted with a genuine prospect of catastrophic transformation, it is the most germane, while the linear mode of continued progress and development is illusory. As with other political phenomena, apocalypticism in itself is a form rather than a content; an empty signifier which can attract to itself a variety of beliefs and imperatives.

To dismiss something as apocalyptic, then, is in itself a mode of disavowal.

What is certain is that a conservative stance (the Romanitas of the current aeon) is an impossibility. There is nothing to conserve. Global capitalism relies on constant change and upheaval, and the drive towards accumulation brings destruction in its path. It is the nature of the beast. So, a stance of denial towards climate change is – in its effects – a death drive, an imperative to maintain an illusion long past its necessary confrontation with the spectre of the Real. Think Peak Oil, think the colonisation of the biological and the Commons by commerce, think the destruction of forests and species. All this is real, and it may well be that limits to growth are fast approaching. The end of non-renewable resources, a phenomenon whose timing is the only issue over the next century or so, is a fact. To proclaim, metaphorically, “let’s party like it’s 1999″, is not an answer.

So, in a way, the psychology of conservative skepticism is “Après moi, le déluge”. And, of course, for Louis XIV, or rather for the mode of being that he embodied, the deluge arrived a few decades afterwards.

It will become increasingly clear, over the next few decades, that business as usual with a few tweaks is an impossibility. The current noise of ‘climate change skepticism’ will not survive confrontation with the Real; it’s a symptom of a fractured utopia.

Because the actual utopians in this picture are those for whom history has ended; the liberal ideologues whose complacency has already been disturbed, whose only response to transformational change is to deny it, because we already live in the best of all possible worlds. The conditions of possibility for such an attitude are already collapsing.

So, what is to be done?

It’s here that the role of the imaginary is crucial.

There is no necessity or certainty to the course of human affairs. It is eminently possible that the impacts of climate change, politically, might be a future of violent conflicts over resources, an increasing abrogation of human freedoms, uncontrolled population movements, and the continued reduction of politics to a corporate game.

In fact, that may well be the track we’re on.

But it’s not necessarily so.

As I alluded to above, events only appear necessary in retrospect. The necessity of the present moment is driven by a failure of imagination, or more properly, a refusal to imagine and a blockage of the imaginative faculty. If politics is the contest of the delineation of the contours of the social, economic and cultural; that is to say, the establishment of the conditions for how we shall live, then we don’t have much of it at the moment. We have the ‘administration of things’, and the best that we can manage is elite-driven technocratic tinkering.

We need to revive our faculties of imagination, in a future anterior mode. That is to say, we need to conceive of the end state we want to see – a juster, fairer and sustainable world order which can accommodate itself to the exigencies of climate change – and work backwards from there. In order to avert the apocalypse. That is a political task, and let there be no mistake about what we’re engaged in. So, in fact, secular ecologists need to work against the ‘end of days’; and to do so with an eye to the long term, not the short term noise of rabid denialism. “Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect” isn’t a bad slogan, still. We need to be realistic to confront the effects of the Real.

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. As the modelling Peter Garrett released shows, Kevin Rudd deliberately ensured that compensation for low income earners was much more generous, and ongoing, than similar Howard era packages; the GST, for instance.

Secondly, unlike income tax (though somewhat similarly to the GST), the effects on household finances are variable, depending on consumption patterns. This, after all (again leaving aside the failure of the CPRS to materially affect corporate emissions, at least in the short term), is the point – a price signal on emissions across the economy, including to the household sector.

Politically, as Garrett’s rhetoric today indicates, it’s designed to allow higher income earners who may have some cost increases to feel either warm and fuzzy about ‘doing their bit for the planet’, or to modify their consumption patterns. Those who will see it as a nasty impost in this demographic are probably already Coalition voters, and my suspicion is that the responses to polling questions about making a financial sacrifice are more likely to be genuine among upper middle to high income earners.

Many of Abbott’s ‘battlers’ will actually make a buck.

In short, I wouldn’t be jumping to any conclusions that flicking the switch to an argument over the affects of the CPRS on individual and household balance sheets necessarily gives the Coalition the advantage most commentators seem to have been assuming it does.

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.]

Copenhagen was supposed to be the last chance for humanity on an assumption that emissions in the future would continue to grow as they have in the past. But what if the future is one of contraction and disorganisation anyway?

In the lead up to Copenhagen it was repeatedly said that this was “the last chance to save the climate”. This idea was constructed on an assumption about “business as usual”. If emissions continue to grow on current trends then, with little time left to put on the brakes and decarbonise the global economy at a sufficient rate, the task appears to be totally unfeasible.

With many scientists credibly arguing that we are already over the safe limit for greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere this may be true. There is now a good case that we need to go beyond decarbonising in the economy to actually finding technologies and processes to take CO2 that is already in the atmosphere out again.

So is the situation now quite hopeless? Perhaps so… but perhaps not. A reason for being at least a little bit hopeful is the questionable assumption of what “business as usual” will be like. The common assumption is that the global economy will continue to grow as it has done over the last few decades. But is this assumption true in the light of peak oil and peak gas?

In the last year global emissions did not grow. As the economy slid into a recession emissions fell with them. One way of constructing the events of the last year are that rising energy prices played a major role in undermining many peoples ability to service their debts. A reckless financial system was undermined. Of course there was more to the financial crisis and the recession than merely a rise in energy and food prices but that was surely an important part of the crisis.

This problem has not gone away. A few weeks ago the Guardian ran a story about a whistleblower in the International Energy Agency. This person had spilled the beans that the IEA is far more concerned that there will be a near term peak in global oil supplies than it has publicly acknowledged. Apparently the IEA’s spin is so as not to spook the financial markets or to undermine the power of the United States, which is very vulnerable to foreign oil supplies.

The conclusion that we can draw from this is that coming down the tracks there is an energy crunch and/or that, as the global real economy picks up, energy prices will continue rising. Rising oil prices will be good news to companies building follies in the Persian Gulf and in Moscow, but it will be bad news for continued growth in the global economy. It means that business as usual emissions will not be quite the same as projected in some of the IPCC studies.

There is no denying, of course, that the future is unclear. If oil and gas become much more expensive, and suppliers of them become insecure, the temptation to use more coal is enhanced. Coal power and coal to liquid technologies are both extremely CO2 intensive. Without carbon mitigation, for example a successful program of carbon capture and storage, oil and gas depletion could make the climate crisis even worse. As is widely acknowledged, the future potential of carbon capture and storage is unknown. It will certainly be a long time until it is extensively applied.

On the other hand, the rise in energy prices might undermine the economy and therefore investment in coal power. The Kingsnorth power station was doubtless put on hold because of successful campaigning but it was put on hold because of the recession too.

To return to the main point – the narrative about Copenhagen has been about the last ditch chance to prevent a growing economy bringing a climate catastrophe along with it. But what if the future is not one of continued expansion but one of contraction and disorganisation? We have had a recovery in the financial markets over the last year because states have been prepared to underwrite the losses of the financial sector. And the financial sector has gone back to its old speculative ways with very little in the way of regulation or control being imposed. In the background there is good reason to believe that the energy crisis has only just begun. Unlike the climate crisis which happens with a considerable time delay, the oil and gas depletion crisis will happen in real time.

There is another reason too to consider that the future will not simply be a projection of the past. One of the most perceptive studies of the response of governance systems to “stress urges” is that of the historian and archaeologist Joseph Tainter. In his study The Collapse of Complex Societies he argues that it is not war, crop failure, disease or economic crisis that in and of themselves create conditions for the collapse of societies, it is the inability of the governing, management, and technical arrangements of the society to cope with these stress surges. This inability to cope arises because they have simply become too complex. Any and every society tries to respond to its problems with increasing complexity but the returns to that complexity decline over time.

Is there reason to believe that our society is already too complex in Tainter’s sense? I believe that there is and, what is more, the withdrawal of energy from the complex arrangements of modern society due to passing the oil peak will make the situation even worse. The future is likely to be one of considerable disorganisation.

What is the evidence for this view? Let us take some examples. In the middle of October a report appeared on the Bloomberg news service with a headline that read: “Nations leave 91% of Green Stimulus Funds Unspent”. It began as follows:

The US, China and major economies around the world are still holding about 91% of the $177 billion in stimulus money promised for clean energy development because most projects have not been evaluated, a report showed. Administrative hurdles remain to the majority of developers, with just 9% of the total funds having been disbursed from economic stimulus programs. “The process of disbursement has been a sobering experience,” said Anna Czajkowska, an analyst and author of the study.

One has to ask therefore, whether governments are actually capable of delivering “Green New Deals”. Many people assume that if money is allocated to something then that is all that needs to be done. Of course this is not true. Expenditure has to be administered according to clear criteria. In new and innovative fields where the expertise and capacity does not exist that is no small thing. Some things are murderously complicated to administer, especially in fields where the bureaucrats have no experience or expertise.

In general climate policy is proving extraordinarily complex in its delivery. This is partly because fossil fuel use is, directly and indirectly, a feature of virtually every aspect of our society. The number of stakeholders is enormous. Thus, when we take, for example, the European Union’s emissions trading system, the political accommodation of a mass of vested interests, has led to an extraordinarily complicated arrangement. There are multiple loopholes and get out clauses.

In the United States we see a similar problem in the cap and trade system going before the US Congress. So far the bill is 1,428 pages long (and growing). This complexity is partly the result of “regulatory capture” whereby multiple corporate lobbies have an influential hand in crafting policies to suit themselves.

There is a similar problem with climate policies related to land use and deforestation. The conditions on the ground are nowhere the same as anywhere else. But one cannot have a policy adapted to each location.

If the policies at national or European level are convoluted, then how much more complex would agreeing a global arrangement be? “This is the most complicated deal the world has ever tried to put together,” says Tom Burke, an adviser on climate change to the Foreign Office. “In effect, you’re asking nearly 200 countries to align their energy policies – to create a common world energy policy.” It is hardly surprising that the UNFCC process has been so chaotic.

Then of course if governments do agree specific climate mitigation commitments, they must be able to deliver on those commitments. This is not straightforward. On the surface it seems that the simple way to go about this is to promote a few large-scale engineering projects. Carbon capture and storage has already been mentioned. The other example is nuclear power. Unfortunately, the same problem of declining returns to increased complexity applies in the field of large-scale engineering.

At the time of writing there has been a decision to build 10 nuclear power stations in Britain similar to the one being built in Olkiluoto in Finland. So lets take that as a case study. According to a recent article in the news magazine Der Spiegel there are 4,300 workers from 60 countries working with 700 subcontractors building this “third generation” nuclear power station. The complexity of globalisation is mixed in with the complexity of advanced technology and nuclear power. So what is the result? It is 2,300 million Euros over budget; the scheduled finishing date is now 2012 although it was supposed to be the spring of 2009; there have been 3,000 faults in construction so far. Perhaps worst of all, there is no satisfactory design for the control system of the reactor, so that the developers are in conflict with the Finnish nuclear safety authority.

Worldwide there are 52 nuclear reactors under construction. 13 of these have been under construction for 20 years. 24 have no scheduled completion date. At least part of the problem is that in many countries the staff of nuclear power stations are now coming up for a retirement and there are few new nuclear engineers to replace them. In Britain and in the USA about 40% of the nuclear workforce will retire in the next 10 years. With few to replace them the idea that a massive nuclear program can be developed rapidly and safely is highly questionable.

We are being asked to believe that governments can manage a process from here to 2050 and beyond involving a mass of tough and complex political and economic decisions. To be able to deliver on their commitments they will need enough trained and motivated people; enough political attention and intention; an ability to handle the financial risks over decades; and institutional capacity to develop, disseminate, and service new technologies; sufficient managerial ability; the capacity of the media and political leaders to remain focused on crucial problems; a consensus among voters about important priorities; a sufficient ability to look far ahead to anticipate problems; long runs secure energy and material supplies reserve for investment purposes instead of consumption; an ability to evolve the legal framework; coordination and cooperation with other governments. (Here I draw on Meadows D, Meadows D and Randers J, Limits to Growth. The 30 Year Update, Earthscan 2005, p223.)

In all seriousness one must ask whether this is a realistic prospect. As the world becomes more complex it becomes necessarily more opaque. The more interrelated elements that there are in any given situation the harder it is to trace back the causative influences determining events. At the same time it becomes less easy to predict what the knock-on consequences of an event or an action will be. The creation of unintended side consequences becomes inevitable. The management and steering of complex systems becomes virtually impossible. What really happens is a constant process of knee-jerk responses, a constant process of review and studies from consultants and a public relations facade to hide the underlying chaos.

In large and complex systems, top-down management tends to break down. In the Copenhagen negotiations China was criticised for refusing to be open to external verification of its greenhouse gas emissions. I would speculate that at least one of the reasons is that the Chinese negotiators realised they already have great difficulty in exercising any central control over local and regional administrations and businesses. At the back of their minds they are probably aware they could not accommodate external verification even if they wanted to – at least not without it leading to a great deal of aggravation from largely autonomous local party bosses and their business allies.

For politicians in general the future will certainly be full of distractions dragging them away from the necessary focus on climate priorities. The aforementioned process of complexification is making the banking and financial system extremely difficult to manage. There will be plenty to do “managing” this problem. Clever mathematicians devised financial instruments of such sophistication that no one could value them so the banks lost trust in each other when energy prices took the top off the speculative frenzy. The complexity of the banking system in an internationally networked digital world makes regulation extremely difficult. Yet the finance system is a hub network. If it breaks down, chaos cascades in all directions.

We may yet find that financial chaos breaks out again and has profound effects not only on general economic activity but also on the technological “progress” that we have come to take for granted. Consider how that might come about. After the Lehman Brothers collapse, banks would not issue the letters of credit required for international trade as they did not trust counter-party banks. One reason for the 90% drop in the Baltic Dry Shipping Index was the temporary freezing of such financing.

Thus a re-emergence of financial panic, in the context of financial institutions taking in the deeper meaning of peak oil, is likely to have considerable disruptive effects in world trade. Yet the smooth running of world trade is necessary to the maintenance of the technical infrastructure on which society has come to depend. Just to take one example – a mobile phone requires 22 basic elements in its production. These have to be a sourced quite literally from every continent on the planet. Much energy is expended in long journeys involving mining, transport, trade, manufacturing and retailing operations before and assembled product is available for use. Similar complexity applies to other computer, digital and electronic systems. A prolonged energy shock, creating a financial shock, morphing into a trade shock, would when prolonged eventually lead to a failure to replace phones, computers and so on. After a time the components would start to degrade and, with them, the systems in which they operate. This would of course be slowed down by a long process of scavenging components and recycling their use where this is possible.

One therefore has to ask whether governments, individually and collectively, are losing their power to steer the course of events. Complex multi-dimensional policies are losing their effectiveness. In circumstances of this sort, whatever policies governments adopt must be made simple and overarching and then it must be left to engaged and informed citizens to do the rest. For this citizens must act on their own initiative and will need to support initiatives that go above and beyond the household level.

In the meantime governments will struggle to find simple effective policy instruments and ways of maintaining social cohesion in the face of growing unrest. As governments and large corporations are increasingly seen to fail in the context of energy descent millions of people will be forced into supplementary “self-help” solutions – growing some of their own food, and adapting their lifestyles to power cuts. Governments will need to go with this flow and, ideally, support engaged citizens or they will find themselves working against them.

There are no magic bullets for this situation. The assumption of governments is that there are large scale solutions for large scale problems but this is not so. The problems have to be solved one house, one street, one neighbourhood, one farm, one forest, one region at a time. This will require the active engagement of millions of people as eco-citizens. Well-informed and appropriately skilled citizens will need to act together to develop, protect and maintain their own health and that of their communities. This will be mainly a movement of projects rather than a movement of protest – because a movement of protest will be largely futile. There is a danger that our betters will be seen to have lost the plot. Governments will have mega-deficits and will be forced to choose what to spend money on. Will they put this money into banks, or into largely futile big engineering projects or will they support ordinary people’s efforts to bring back some control into their lives by eco-renovating their homes and neighbourhoods?

Despite everything there are relatively simple policy options that could be implemented when the logjam created by corporate vested interests eases. At a certain stage it may be that an active citizens’ movement will have a lot more clout and governments will be able to base themselves on these movements and act more strongly against carbon corporate interests.

The simplest policy would be to set a rapidly reducing limit on the amount of carbon allowed into the economy by a permit scheme imposed upon the very small number of fossil fuel suppliers. To maintain social cohesion the revenue raised when fossil fuel suppliers have to buy permits to sell would go to the population per capita (‘Cap and Share’). This would channel the carbon revenues to the base of the economy, where it is most usefully applied, helping to fund the process of making houses, gardens and neighbourhoods more eco-efficient.

Ideally governments would support and encourage community-led self-help adapting to energy descent and carbon reduction as well as developing lay expertise. It would channel resources and support to communities and households rather than to mega schemes that are likely to fail.

To conclude, the current discourse about the aftermath of Copenhagen assumes a future that is merely a projection of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. Humanity has now reached the limits to economic growth. Climate change is just one manifestation of this. Having overshot and overused natural capital humanity stands before turbulent times. The complex governance and management arrangements underpinned by plenty of cheap energy will not be up to dealing with the problems we face. A totally different politics and totally different lifestyles are necessary if humanity is to have any chance of seeing out the century. At the same time the future may yet prove more malleable than we think. Whether this is really a cause for hope after Copenhagen remains to be seen. But let us at least discuss the real issues rather than the banalities of the official narrative.

Update: After Copenhagen II.

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.

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?

The budget starts taking on a distinctly camouflage mottled hue, unfortunately, when you examine the transport funding plans. On the green side of things there are substantial investments proposed for urban rail pretty much everywhere except NSW. However, the freight rail sector seems to have largely missed out. While there is a reasonable chunk of funding to the Australian Rail Track Corporation, most of that goes to funding infrastructure to export coal from the Hunter. By contrast, there’s roads going everywhere.

Aside from shifting coal around, it seems that the government still believes that the best way to shift goods around Australia is to unload them at the docks and throw them on trucks hurtling down freeways. Pity.

The first is around corporate culture. The ‘Anglo-American’ model of capitalism, as Martin Wolf usefully calls it, is a collection of deeply culturally assumptions about how a business should operate: their goal (profit maximisation), the ‘commodfiability’ of businesses themselves, and so forth. Assuming WP operates within this culture, who do we blame if the solar thermal plant is not found to be ‘financially viable’? The government for not studiously applying Coasean theory in time and getting Emissions Trading going? The market for not sufficiently pricing the carbon efficiency of the project – ie. another market failure after years of warnings? These are as much questions about our expectations of governments in designing an emissions trading scheme (and sending appropriate signals during the consultation phase) as businesses, but I think worth asking.

The second is around the broader policy context of projects like this. As Robert’s various posts of late have demonstrated, there’s no shortage of daring engineering projects and neat technical fixes. However, as I argue in a co-authored piece in the current issue of the Australian Review of Public Affairs, such proposals are not enough. We also need to start discussing energy demands as social things, rather than simply a matter of correct pricing or installing a well timed deus ex machina, if we’re going to make any real headway on climate change. As we point out, quoting Nicholas Stern and Cameron Hepburn, ‘[c]limate change policy … raises questions that are fundamentally and inescapably ethical’…”

Any comments, criticisms or feedback on the piece itself would be appreciated, as we’ll be turning it into a longer ‘Journal’ article. (I’d particularly appreciate comments from some of the self described ‘marketdroids’