Archive for the 'Climate change' Category

Killing solar PV softly

Published
by
Robert Merkel
2 days, 9 hours ago
in Budget 2008, Climate change, Energy and Politics
. 73 Comments

Possum’s analysis of the broad policy objectives being played out in a subtle, piecewise fashion shows the political strategy of the Rudd government in the large. Be that as it may, there’s plenty of evidence of raw political cunning as well; I’d just like to point to a little policy announcement in the budget that demonstrates it. The policy in question isone that directly impacts my own upcoming spending plans - that is, to put some grid-connected solar panels on my roof, subsidised by the Photovoltaic Rebate Programme, which gives a subsidy of up to $8000 on such systems.

As discussed on a couple of previous LP threads, the rebate, while great for the beneficiaries, is in my opinion woeful public policy. To summarise, solar cells are currently way more expensive than just about any other renewable option, including wind, utility-scale solar thermal and CSP, small-scale hydropower, biomass, possibly geothermal and especially energy efficiency - you name it, it’s better value. But even if you specifically want to subsidise solar panels on roofs, it’s dumb policy, because it encourages them on the wrong roofs. For the same amount of money, you can put a lot more solar panels (and the extra support gear required) on the roofs of factories, schools, and offices, and generate a lot more power, than you can with domestic-size installations. Furthermore, if you look at what other forms of generation rooftop solar is likely to displace, it’s not coal or gas. It’s those other, arguably more promising, forms of renewable generation, because of the vagaries of the real, substantial incentive in place for renewable energy, the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target.

Whether you personally agree with that or not, it seems that there are plenty in the government who do, and decided they’d like to spike the program. But - as any thread on the topic at LP reveals - there are plenty of people who like solar energy, and like the idea of incentives to see it deployed on rooftops. So how to square the desire to stop this perceived waste of resources, with the desire not to have the supporters of solar panels - many of whom inhabit the political territory between Labor and the Greens - get too publicly upset?

Continue reading ‘Killing solar PV softly’

The budget rituals

Published
by
Robert Merkel
5 days, 12 hours ago
in Budget 2008, Climate change and Economics
. 25 Comments

I’m clearly getting old and cynical. But it seems that the pre-Budget media leaks have followed the conventional pattern even more than normal. We’ve had a couple of weeks of tax rises, such as the T**t Fuel Tax (my SO’s name for the stuff, not mine…), the Toorak Tractor Tax, and the means testing of the baby bonus.

Now, as we get closer to the budget, we get softer pieces on new expenditure, like money for climate change - though it’s just the implementation of election commitment at this stage, with no new policy AFAICT. Not to mention the adjustment of the Medicare surcharge threshold.

Anybody want to place a bet on there being a couple of “surprise” spending initiatives in the Budget speech? Perhaps a major education announcement?

Continue reading ‘The budget rituals’

Climate Policy Salad

Published
by
dk.au
1 week, 2 days ago
in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Policy and Technology
. 31 Comments

Fresh updates from the world of emissions trading:

    * GetUp has a new petition: Climate Need Not Corporate Greed. The premise is simple: call a spade a spade and make emissions trading actually impact emissions rather than just transfer $$$ to polluting industries. Also worth signing because it may be leverage against a tendency to overallocate that has been a consistent problem that previous cap and trade schemes such as US Markets in SO2, BP’s internal scheme and the EU ETS have had to come to terms with.

    * The BBC Reports that a plan for national Personal Carbon Trading for the UK, arguably one of the most ambitious, complex and comprehensive Neoliberal projects in recent times, has been shelved. DEFRA research into the proposals to give every adult in the UK a personal ‘allowance’ included interviews with 92 people. The money quote is one for all the national psycho-social historians, “Just straight away it reminds me of going back to the war and rationing.”

    * NSW Govt has announced it plans to join HSBC, NAB, Coldplay et al by becoming carbon neutral by 2020. The plan will include state-run operations like police, hospitals, schools, and power-stations. It looks like most of the emissions reductions will be made by eating koala buying carbon offsets rather than making significant changes to BAU.

    * PhD Comics has some sustainability tips

How would you feel about Australia without koalas?

Published
by
Brian
1 week, 2 days ago
in Climate change
. 31 Comments

Not good, I’d wager.

When we looked at polar bears recently I was left with the feeling that their future was very much bound up with the future of the Arctic ice. They at least have the prospect of meeting the grizzly bears being forced further north and producing lots of little grolar bears - hybrid offspring of the polar bear and the grizzly.

No such luck for the koala bear which is highly specialised to a diet of gum leaves, which, it seems are tuning sour.

Prof Hume [University of Sydney] will present new research at a major science conference in Canberra showing that increases in CO2 decrease levels of “good” nutrients and increase toxic nutrients in eucalypt leaves.

It gets worse.

Continue reading ‘How would you feel about Australia without koalas?’

Disaster resilience

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 week, 3 days ago
in Climate change, Disasters, Policy, Politics, Security and Terrorism
. 36 Comments

The unfolding mass human tragedy that is the Burmese cyclone (the specifics of which I don’t have anything except that a) I hope that the junta stops putting up barriers to international assistance, and b) that it’s going to make the global food crunch worse) reminds us of the awesome power of nature to inflict death and destruction. While we have great capacity for inflicting misery on our fellow humans, nature has similar capacities and inflicts them far more randomly and far more often. Particularly when compared small groups of discontents sitting in caves in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

But how is Australia prepared for such disasters? Not very well, according to a just-published report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. For instance, while everybody expects the ABC to handle emergency services broadcasting, ABC Local Radio doesn’t have redundant communications links to all its stations. We may have invested money in tsunami sensors, but there’s no centralized telephone warning system (something that could be done very cheaply, according to the report). Our hospitals aren’t really set up for a surge capacity in the case of even rather modest incidents.

This kind of stuff is often cheap, mostly relatively easy, and could potentially spare a lot of heartache when the unthinkable happens, be it through accident or malevolence. But why don’t we do it? Because it has the unique combination of being both scary and boring, earns governments no credit until the crap hits the fan, and we don’t have a historical precedent of a mass-casualty incident. And, over the past few years, we’ve had the distraction of the horribly overblown War on Terrah - something, incidentally, the ASPI has helped in its own small way to fan here.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that the Rudd government has a bit more of a focus on the boring bits of government than its predecessor. This is one boring bit that I hope gets more attention.

Landline on the Murray-Darling plan

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 week, 5 days ago
in Climate change, Economics, Environment and Water
. 15 Comments

There hasn’t been much commentary about the government’s announcements on the Murray-Darling plan - notably, the beginnings of large-scale buybacks of water rights - in the blogosphere so far; Quiggin thinks it’s good because they’ve announced they’re going to start buying back water; the only problem is that they’re not buying back enough. However, the ABC comes to the rescue with a a lengthy report from the Landline program.

There’s lots to chew on in this report - for one thing, it makes the excellent point that while rice may be a water hog, it’s one of the only things grown in the basin that can be planted after it’s clear how much water is available. And the stupidity of holding water in Queensland and northern NSW, much of it to just evaporate, while the Coorong dies is fairly dramatically illustrated.
Continue reading ‘Landline on the Murray-Darling plan’

Energy roundup - cars vs trucks, better biofuel

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 week, 6 days ago
in Climate change, Economics, Energy, Markets, Transport and USA
. 17 Comments

While everyone’s heard the jokes about the USA being the land of the monster truck, it’s not until you actually go there and wander round a shopping mall carpark that you appreciate just how gargantuan the average American family vehicle is. The typical American car isn’t a car at all, it’s a Ford F-150 SuperCrew, a 2500 kg behemoth. They’re terrible to drive, by all reports, and get about 13mpg - or, if you like, use 18 litres for every 100 kilometres driven. But, since 2001, sales of “light-duty trucks” of this ilk have exceeded total sales of passenger cars in the United States, helped not only by cheap fuel but a collection of tax write-offs that encouraged their purchase.
Continue reading ‘Energy roundup - cars vs trucks, better biofuel’

Efficiency over the decades

Published
by
Robert Merkel
2 weeks, 3 days ago
in Climate change, Economics, Energy, Environment and Transport
. 36 Comments

Planning academic Paul Mees has been a tireless advocate for Melbourne’s public transport system for a long time. And, while his views on various topics are often disputed by other experts, they’re always worth a read. Ditto his latest research, which makes the observation that the average fuel economy of the Australian vehicle fleet has essentially stayed the same for 45 years:

In research for the Garnaut Climate Change Review, Melbourne University’s Dr Paul Mees has used Australian Bureau of Statistics figures to show that fuel efficiency has remained practically unchanged since 1963.

In that year — the first date efficiency was recorded by the Federal Government — the average Australian car used 11.4 litres of petrol to travel 100 kilometres.

In 2006, according to the ABS’s Survey of Motor Vehicle Use, it remained identical.

Continue reading ‘Efficiency over the decades’

Polar bears and other animals

Published
by
Brian
2 weeks, 6 days ago
in Climate change
. 19 Comments

polar-bears.jpg

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada has just decided that while Canada’s 15,000 polar bears are threatened by climate change they are not in immediate danger. The Committee found that numbers are decreasing in some places and increasing in others.

Hence polar bears are to remain a ’species of special concern’ rather than an ‘endangered species’. But that does not mean that all of us and the Canadian Government in particular can relax. The classification requires the Government to take legislative action.

Continue reading ‘Polar bears and other animals’

Molitor@UNSW

Published
by
dk.au
3 weeks, 3 days ago
in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Government, Markets and Technology
. 11 Comments

Michael Molitor gave a public lecture last night at UNSW, where he now holds an adjunct professorship with the Climate Change Research Centre between appointments as a ‘Carbon Manager’ for PriceWaterhouseCooper. The talk was entitled Climate Change: ‘Show Me The Money’, which is the famous line from Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire - so when Molitor spoke passionately of the ‘Governor of NSW’, I was thankful that there were no couches onstage. Though, to be fair, the event showcased a fascinating, eclectic and sometimes contradictory mix of bravado-filled insights on the problem of climate change from someone on the inner circle of business elites. The message was familiar enough - that we aren’t moving quickly enough for the scale of the problem - his analysis, however, was somewhat less conventional.

The ‘good news’ began with the observation that our ‘carbon productivity’, that is, our economic outputs from machines relative to their spewing waste into the global carbon dump has actually been increasing over time. Continue reading ‘Molitor@UNSW’

Timid, dull, and vague

Published
by
Robert Merkel
3 weeks, 4 days ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Climate change, Environment and Water
. 40 Comments

It’s unrealistic to expect detailed policy prescriptions to come out of two days of discussion - though the choice of two days of discussion with SFA preparation was entirely the government’s. And a variety of sources are saying that the interim reports really struggled to capture the tenor of the actual discussions. But the interim report of the “population, sustainability, climate change, water and the future of our cities” subgroup at the 2020 Summit fits right into Jeremy Sear’s typically snarky critique. While there is some substantive and good ideas, it’s mixed in with a collection of meaningless motherhood statements, populist pandering, prediliction for bureaucracy, and an overly narrow focus.

Below the fold, I’ve outlined the “top ideas” proposed by this stream, with some brief comments, and some reflections on the stuff that didn’t make the cut.

Continue reading ‘Timid, dull, and vague’

Early childhood revolution… by 2020

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Climate change, Education, Health, Parenting, Policy, Polls and Poverty
. 55 Comments

Kevin Rudd’s pre-empted his own summit with his announcement at a Sydney Institute dinner last night of a proposal for universal early childhood centres. I don’t necessarily see any problem with that - the importance of early childhood for all sorts of things - crime prevention, skills and cognitive development, health outcomes, etc - is very well recognised in research from a number of disciplines and it’s one area where a “whole of government” focus can be very useful indeed, and should properly be debated at the summit.

Rudd’s speech can be accessed here.

In terms of the detail of the announcement, I have a lot of sympathy with the arguments of not for profit childcare centres, but the announcement is so aspirational (as it were) that there’s plenty of time to have a proper debate. It is important to note that his proposal isn’t just for childcare. It fits in with Kevin Rudd’s overall agenda of promoting equality of opportunity through policy intervention at the earliest possible stage of life - something I wrote about in my paper for the Search Foundation when I was seeking to identify a unifying ideological thread to his thought.

It’s interesting to compare what Rudd has identified as a major focus of the summit’s agenda with the results of polling conducted by the ANU. Continue reading ‘Early childhood revolution… by 2020′

World Bank finances 4-gigawatt coal plant in India

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Developing world, Environment, Foreign policy, International and Poverty
. 5 Comments

The New York Times’ environmental blog, Dot Earth, has the story

The troubling tension between propelling prosperity and limiting climate risks in a world still wedded to fossil fuels is on full display this week. India’s Tata Power group just gained important financial backing from the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank, for its planned $4 billion, 4-billion watt “Ultra Mega” coal-burning power plant complex in Gujarat state.

While it might be tempting to decry this development (and I’m very, very tempted), the alternatives aren’t exactly cheery either. This plant might be huge, but they’re at least built with state-of-the-art coal technology, which is substantially more efficient than the alternatives. And the global abstract concerns of climate change are brought into perspective when you realize (As pointed out in their comments thread) hundreds of thousands of Indians die every year from pollution - the pollution of the air in their house from cooking fires. And while we all might like this to be made redundant by solar panels or windmills, the more likely alternatives are millions of petroleum-fuelled small generators, or dozens of small, inefficient, and even more polluting smaller coal-fired plants. Or nukes - if they could get the uranium from somewhere…

Nelson still slightly above cash rate (give or take MoE)

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 1 week ago
in Budget 2008, Climate change and Polls
. 24 Comments

Newspoll’s out, and it’s not good news for the compassionate conservatives. Labor on 59-41 2PP, and Rudd leading Nelson by 73-9. Shanahan spin here and as always, a vigorous discussion at The Poll Bludger.

A few comments:

Continue reading ‘Nelson still slightly above cash rate (give or take MoE)’

My 2020 sustainability submission

Published
by
Robert Merkel
1 month, 1 week ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Climate change, Environment and Science
. 39 Comments

One of the odder parts of Australia 2020 is the only substantial opportunity for non-participants to have an input into the discussions; the 500-word submission process. But it’s not at all clear whether the volunteer participants will actually read any of them - if, indeed, most don’t end up being filtered out by anonymous staffers in the Prime Minister’s department.

Be that as it may, I figured an hour or two’s effort to throw an idea or two in the pot can’t hurt. If you want to do the same, you’ll have to hurry - submissions end close of business Wednesday.

My submission is on a topic that regular readers of LP will know I’ve an interest in - geoengineering, that is, taking active measures to control the climate to moderate some effects of global warming. The submission is over the fold.

Continue reading ‘My 2020 sustainability submission’