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
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’
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’
It may just be that Greg Hunt knows he’s never actually going to have to justify his policy ideas to Treasury or the Productivity Commission. But, at the moment, you’d swear he was the Greens environment spokesperson, not the Liberal Party’s. He’s proposing a whole raft of measures to promote the development of solar energy in Australia.
Of most direct short-term interest is the proposal for a national “feed-in tariff” scheme. To explain this, first some background. If you’ve got access to grid electricity, solar panels are currently financial lunacy. The solar system I’m currently being quoted on (thanks to commenter wilful for the tip) costs about $12,000, and generates about $225 worth of electricity every year. By contrast, if I left that $12,000 in the bank, I’d get at least double that after tax. If I put the money into a share fund, over the course of a decade I’d probably do much better again. I’d be able to pay for GreenPower from my electricity supplier, and have a considerable pile of money left over.
So why am I looking at solar cells? Because of the massive government rort known as the Photovoltaic Rebate Programme. Essentially, the government will pay $8000 towards the cost of my 1 kilowatt installation. I only have to pay somewhere around $4000, and it works out pretty close to cost effective.
Continue reading ‘Greens Coalition propose national solar feed-in tariff’
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’
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’
Like 2020 summit participant Professor Hugh Possingham (though possibly for different reasons), I’m a little bit disappointed with the 2020 sustainability sub-summit outcomes. But he does mention one interesting, positive development:
One very good recommendation to emerge was a call for credible, popular and independent national environmental accounts/metrics. At least if we count some important things for a while, and we can deliver that to the public in a meaningful and engaging way, the nation may get a better handle on some of the big environmental issues, like extinctions, and want to do something serious about them.
But it’s not just the sustainability stream that called for better statistics - and, just importantly, better reporting of statistics - in areas important to public policy. The “strengthening communities and supporting working families” stream floated the idea of a “national development index” reporting measures of social inclusion - homelessness was the one specifically mentioned by Tim Costello. And, while it didn’t come up in the indigenous 2020 stream, we’ve already had the pledge to close various health and educational outcome gaps. So we’ve got all these measures of Australia’s progress on various issues floating around - statistics which aren’t necessarily new, but are being given more priority. Which raises the question of how they can be placed on the nation’s collective agenda more prominently.
Continue reading ‘State of the nation address’
I’m not passing judgement on the substantive issue, about which there was a big debate here a while back, simply because it’s not one on which I’ve investigated the merits, but Peter Garrett’s call for an “urgent working group” after a meeting of state Environment Ministers failed to agree on any scheme for phasing out plastic shopping bags is pretty pathetic. Much more difficult issues - such as the Murray/Darling - have been resolved between the Commonwealth and the states since the election of the Rudd government. After a gaffe prone campaign, Garrett had the sharp end of his portfolio given to Penny Wong. Maybe we’re starting to see why - it may well be that state ministers are too close to commercial interests or given to soundbite populism like Verity Firth apparently is, but the whole point of the co-operative process was surely to produce results on issues of national importance and not to defer decision-making endlessly.
Continue reading ‘Plastic Pete’
SMH Reports that the WWF and Climate Institute will join the CFMEU and Coal Industry to promote clean coal funding by governments
“If it’s going to work we need to know quickly. If it’s not going to work we need to know even more quickly,” Mr Bourne said. “If it’s never tested we are have deep problems on a world wide basis.”
As an aside, it’s hard to know whether there is actually a World Wildlife Fund funding, y’know, Wildlife behind the hyper-managed brand these days. They seem more concerned with planting vacuous stories in The Age about vacuous people publicising that they’ll be switching their lights off or getting photo ops with Telstra’s fanciful, Futurist exercises in potential reality-displacement.
What’s immediately concerning about Bourne’s statement is the implicitly Whiggish invocation of a ‘test’ that will resolve disputes about the place of carbon sequestration in the policy mix, presumably by speaking for Nature itself. If the last four decades of Science Studies research have taught us anything, it’s that testing does not magically resolve hypotheses. The best you can hope for on the boundaries of technoscience is some kind of closure. Continue reading ‘Annals of Naive Science, Episode 12938/WWF’
First it was oil. Now it’s food, and the people of the developing world are, as usual, copping the worst of it:
Basic access to food is slipping out of reach for many people in developing countries. The cost of the rice has risen by more than three-quarters in two months and the price of wheat has more than doubled in the same time.
The desperation in dozens of countries has turned deadly of late. In the past week alone there have been violent, food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon.
While there are short term factors pushing up food prices - amongst them, the drought in south-eastern Australia - there are also long-term factors pushing the price up, some not easily fixable, and some that are. Continue reading ‘The food crisis’
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…
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’
Well, Mark might not be picking apart the 2020 list, as it’s too obvious, I’m an obvious kind of person…A few hours Googling later, and we have a horribly superficial, uninformed commentary on the 100 (well, 86 actually) listed delegates to the sustainability sub-summit.
Discussion and the annotated, commentated list over the fold.
Continue reading ‘A linked list - the 2020 participants Googled!’
At 8 pm tonight the lights in your city may well go off for Earth Hour. In 2007 it was Sydney, in 2008 Earth Hour has spread to 24 global cities, next year the world. At the home site you can upload a snappy video or click on the cities list (it was as slow as a wet week when I did it) or if you live where I do go straight to Brisbane and maybe get a “Gateway Time-out” screen as I did.
This one sent to me via email might be better. I suspect it’s on the Courier Mail server.
The Brisbane City Council is suggesting that you go to vantage point to look at the city that you can’t see. Sounds good, if you walk there and don’t use your car. So what are you going to do?
Continue reading ‘Lighting a candle for the earth’
Today’s Australian carries an edited extract of a speech by Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, on what he sees as the dangers of “climate alarmism”.
Klaus is one of the dwindling number of heads of state and/or heads of government who do not accept the consensus of climate scientists, and the large majority opinion of the world’s citizens, about the reality of climate change due to the anthropogenically enhanced greenhouse effect. However, what is interesting about the extract of his speech in the OO is that it does not attempt to seriously engage with or contest the climate science consensus. Nor does it adequately engage with the growing economic literature which suggests that substantial reductions in the carbon intensity of production can be achieved through market-based instruments and without sacrifgicing economic growth. Rather, it makes clear that Klaus’s real objection, as a Hayekian liberal, is that concern over climate change could be the Trojan Horse for a 21st century equivalent of the threat to freedom posed by totalitarian communism. He states that:
Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will nevertheless be identical: the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality. What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its present strongest version, climate alarmism… We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
Continue reading ‘Vaclav Klaus’s incomplete history lesson’
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