The Bracks Review’s final report was released last Friday. The headline recommendations - in essence, tariff cuts to continue, but direct government handouts to also continue in expanded form until 2020 - have been covered extensively elsewhere. But there’s a hell of a lot to chew on in the other 190-odd pages of the document. Much of the report does a pretty good job of undermining the economic case for continued support, in fact; there’s extensive global overcapacity in the industry, China and India are moving up the value chain, and making cars in developed countries is a very unprofitable enterprise at the moment. Furthermore, the modelling for every single free trade agreement we’ve either a) signed, or b) is in the offing, indicates that Australia’s overall economy benefits, but the car industry won’t. So, if the car industry is all important, why are we so keen on signing FTAs that undermine it? But one of the most fascinating sections discusses the impact of climate change on the automotive industry. There is an enormous gap between what the science and the global politics are saying, and how much impact on the sector this is judged likely to have.
As has been said any number of times here on LP, the government’s election promise of 60% emissions cuts by 2050 has been left behind by events; the science is calling for steeper cuts, and any global deal is going to involve Australia making disproportionate cuts because of its enormous per-capita emissions. Absent cheap, environmentally benign carbon air capture and sequestration technology, this will necessarily involve the virtual decarbonization of Australia’s transport sector, and probably over the period of a couple of decades. Thankfully, this looks like it may actually be achievable, through technologies like the plug-in hybrid, the first production example of which will be the Chevrolet Volt.
Continue reading ‘Green disconnect in the Bracks Report’
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?’
Brian’s post has cast his financial eye over the WorleyParsons proposal to build solar thermal power stations across Australia. Now, some technological perspective…but with a financial sting in the tail!
Continue reading ‘The technology behind the WorleyParsons proposal’
That unsightly mess is an example of the landscape modification involved in tar sands mining in Alberta, Canada. We’ll come back to that.
But grabbing the news recently was the announcement that Australian engineering firm WorleyParsons was looking at constructing 34 solar power plants by 2020 worth $34 billion, with a company objective solar providing 40% of the electricity market. [That should read “40% of the renewable electricity market.”]
This is, I think, unequivocally good news.
Continue reading ‘WorleyParsons goes green and black’
Professor Barry Brook’s research involves bringing the power of statistical modeling to ecological issues, most notably the effects of climate change on the environment. So it’s great to discover that he’s now blogging about it at bravenewclimate.com, where he already has some fascinating posts up.
One particularly interesting, and provocative post, is on the topic of methane emissions, linking to an Age op-ed he coauthored on it. Essentially, he argues that the Garnaut Report grossly underestimates the effects of methane emissions (which only persist in the atmosphere for a couple of decades) by averaging them over a century.
Brook has also organized a six-part seminar series on climate change - he’s already put the slides and the audio up from the first . If you’re in Adelaide you might be interested to get along to the remaining seminars, or, for the rest of us, downloading the podcasts.
In any case, it’s great to welcome somebody with Professor Brook’s expertise to the Australian blogosphere. I’ll certainly be reading regularly.
We’ll be seeing plenty of China on our TV screens in the next little while, as long they don’t give us too many long shots. No matter how spectacular the Olympic opening ceremony, if we can see it, I think the abiding image from the Games for me will be the astonishing soup of pollution. I can’t wrap my mind around the kind of hubris and single-minded neglect that could produce such a mess. Rick Birch talking on local radio said the Chinese Government had assured everyone a couple of years ago that the weather would be fine for the opening ceremony, the weather apparently being subject to government will. Hence no need for a plan B in case it rains. Rick says you always have a plan B in case it rains, but not this time.
Continue reading ‘China’s pollution goes global’
Much has been made over the last decade or more of the divide between “elite” opinion and popular opinion on a range of issues. George Megalogenis reports on the divide between popular opinion and that of an important category of elites - major party candidates - at the time of the 2007 Federal election, based on the 2007 Australian Candidate Study.
A key issue on which the candidates were out of alignment with the voters is our old friend, global warming. According to the 2007 Australian Election Study, 51.5% of voters considered this issue “Extremely Important” and a further 36.8% considered it “Quite Important”. This compares with 65.5% of Labor candidates who, according to the candidate study, considered the issue important, and contrasts strikingly with Liberal-National Coalition candidates, of whom only 32.4% considered it important.
This raises the further question of what the result would be of polling other right-of-centre elite constituencies on this issue, such as Quadrant contributors and subscribers, conservative media commentators, and staff and directors of right-of-centre think-tanks. One gets the impression it would be lower than 32.4%.
Continue reading ‘Elites versus masses on climate change’
If a recent article from the BBC is anything to go by, countries that think they are reducing their carbon emissions may in fact be increasing them. It seems that under UN rules no-one owns emissions from aviation and shipping.
Furthermore, no-one counts the increase that comes from imported goods. So moving manufacturing offshore is one way of reducing your GHG emissions score. And any increase in the consumption of material goods doesn’t count when they are imported.
Continue reading ‘Carbon counting conundrums, difficult choices’
At Public Opinion, Gary Sauer-Thompson takes a look at the craziness of a climate change denialist clothing himself in the raiment of the Enlightenment. Astonishing.
Update [by Mark]: Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge links to a piece by David Karoly at Unleashed which debunks a lot of the climate change “scepticism” and has a neat statement of what scientific rationality is actually about.
The Liberals’ position on an emissions trading policy - and climate change - is so obscure that the results of their meeting the other day can be reported in some papers as a defeat for Nelson, and in others as a quixotic victory. Tempers are running so high that the Shadow Cabinet recommendation wasn’t put in writing - lest it leak - and the meeting did policy by whiteboard. But the proceedings leaked anyway. Here are some highlights from Louise Dodson’s story in yesterday’s Fin Review.
It took five hours, a lot of fierce debate and a deal workshopped on a whiteboard, but the coalition party room finally agreed to support Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson on climate change.
…
The party meeting started with the words “climate change is real” being written on the whiteboard. But even this statement could not produce agreement. Backbencher Dennis Jensen said he could not sign up to that statement and it was then removed and replaced by “we give the planet the benefit of the doubt and support action on climate change”.
…
Sources at the meeting said almost all Coalition MPs spoke during the meeting, with one-fifth of them sceptical that there was human-induced climate change, three-fifths of the view that the opposition needed to sort out the position and move on for political reasons and one-fifth arguing against a commitment to an emissions trading scheme specifically by 2012.
Geoengineering - that is, deliberately doing things to modify the Earth’s climate - is something that’s come up a couple of times on LP. There’s a (sort-of) new proposal doing the rounds in a very preliminary form - dumping lime into the ocean, increasing the capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2. The idea is not actually new, but a guy called Tim Kruger has received some funding from Shell to investigate it further. Interestingly, he’s conducting the investigation in an open source manner, keeping all the information gained in the public domain.
To get the lime, you need to heat limestone, which releases a molecule of CO2 in the process. However, the lime, when added to the ocean, will increase the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 by two molecules, so the process appears to be a net win even without directly sequestering the process CO2. But they’re also looking at sequestering that too. The heat source for heating the limestone is also under investigation - Shell’s interest is in using stranded natural gas, but Kruger is also examining alternatives like solar furnaces. As you might gather, this is all very preliminary; the discussions on the project website haven’t - to my knowledge - revealed any showstoppers yet.
It’s of course impossible to predict at this stage whether this proposal is technically, environmentally, or economically feasible. You have to wonder about the consequences of dumping billions of tonnes of lime into the world’s oceans. But, like all of these proposals, I also know that the alternative of not geoengineering isn’t looking great either.
Warning: snark ahead
According to last night’s Lateline, “A growing number of bloggers are now using the internet to attack the science of global warming. Written by climate change sceptics, the blogs are hosting a new scientific debate over whether the world has become hotter or colder during the past ten years.”
The reporter’s evidence for this “new scientific debate”? Andrew Bolt and Jennifer Marohasy. You know, Bolt. The long-serving columnist with a regular gig in the Herald-Sun and Insiders. And Marohasy, the IPA employee whose glass-half-full schtick on the environment has been making its way into the mainstream media for many years. Both do run blogs (in Bolt’s case, to give him credit, he does genuinely blog in a way that most journalists haven’t tried), but the idea that they are in any way new voices on the scene is complete rot. And their “new scientific debate”? A rehashed version of the “world is cooling” nonsense - based on a high-schooler’s level of data analysis - that they’ve been running for years, which as Paul noted has been debunked in detail by any number of experts.
Note to John Stewart (the Lateline reporter, not the Daily Show host): just because somebody says it on the Internet doesn’t make it new, scientific, or interesting. And if you really want to report on climate change blogging, might I suggest there’s a whole other world of it out there that’s been doing a whole lot better covering not only the problem, but the merits of the various solutions, than your program has managed?
Let’s take a look at today’s political “news”, News Limited style, and the ongoing construction of the “media narrative” that according to the press gallery gang, is the only news fit to print.
As noted here, The Opposition Organ spent a bucket of dosh to add extra questions to Newspoll, and chose to run with “Voters Want Costello” as its front page headline over the (presumably less welcome to the masthead of denialism) numbers on climate change, showing overwhelming majorities attributing climate change to AGW and support for an ETS, with a big majority for “not waiting on the world”. So that’s establishing the news agenda through polling to feed the current “media narrative” - centring on the Liberal leadership and Peter Costello lovin’ in particular. And selectivity in emphasis. Then we get selectivity in reporting. The numbers in Newspoll, as Possum points out, don’t show that the voters the Liberals need to persuade are particularly persuadable by a putative Costello return:
The Coalition needs ALP voters to shift to the Coalition, yet ALP voters have a breakdown of 15% more likely and 20% less likely. If Costello became leader, he might not lose voteshare, but neither does he look like he would gain much based on these results.
But Dennis Shanahan doesn’t mention that.
Let’s go back a bit and remember, as Mark pointed out in his review, that the extracts from Inside Kevin07 that kicked the Costello talk off were themselves highly selective - one bit of research done before Rudd became leader and highlighted while the other internal polling and focus group research showing Costello for PM being about as appealling as a piece of wet lettuce was studiously ignored. And let’s not forget either that the “Costello the Saviour” narrative basically depends on the publication date of a book! Leadership calculation by publishing schedule! Melbourne University Press and book distributors hold the nation’s future in their hand!
Then, the big showdown Bolta talked up on the Coalition’s emissions trading scheme stance comes - and Nelson gets rolled.
Meanwhile, the Labor government has basically done away with mandatory detention.
I would venture to suggest that is rather more important than all this other confected nonsense.
Continue reading ‘Reality and unreality in the pundits’ world’
For once, Craig Emerson wasn’t indulging in spin or hyperbole on Lateline last Friday when he claimed that there was a new emissions trading scheme policy every day from the Liberals. For Monday’s edition of Liberal lunacy, we reproduce Bernard Keane’s commentary from Crikey today (with permission). Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy IV’
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