On the weekend we saw the documentary film Up the Yangzte where Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang goes on a journey of discovery back to the setting whence his grandfather came. The film is not about the Yangtze as such. Rather the Yangtze and the Three Gorges Dam, then filling with water, form a backdrop to a look inside the Chinese modernisation dream.
There are plenty of negatives about the Three Gorges project, including environmental concerns, the destruction of local cultural and archaeological sites and the relocation of 1.13 million people. Yet as the peasant family central to the film stoically relocate their worldly possessions literally carrying them up the hill on their backs there is an acceptance of progress and an understanding of the importance of the project to the country.
The film is not about the worth of the project as such; nor does it attempt to give a summative view of its impact on the local people. It is clear, though, that a small minority are called upon to make considerable sacrifices for the good of the many. The clash of interests is much starker in the case of the Dongria Kondh tribespeople of Orissa, India whose sacred mountain is to be scraped bare of its rich deposits of bauxite. They say they will “fight to the death rather than leave their sacred home”.
Continue reading ‘When progress meets an ancient people’
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’
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’
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.
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’
My attention has been drawn to a blog piece by Andrew Bolt which purports to show graphical evidence to support the central dogma of the Stupid Cult of Cooling.
The centrepiece of Bolt’s article is a monthly series graph of global average temperatures from the Hadley Centre for Climate Change. On the basis of this graph Bolt claims that:
As you see, since 1998—an unusually warm year thanks to the “El Nino” pool of warmer water in the Pacific—the world’s temperature dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of cooling.
What Bolt either does not understand, or is not telling his readers, is that monthly series graphs register very short-term (i.e. monthly) fluctuations in global average temperatures. Short-term fluctuations tell us little about long-term trends, which is what the global warming debate is about. I explained this in the LP post linked to above, with reference to year to year trends which are subject to the influence of short-run trends such as movements in the El Nino/La Nina cycle (hereafter referred to as ENSO). What is true with respect to yearly fluctuations holds a fortiori for monthly fluctuations.
Continue reading ‘Rip Van Bolt’s missing months’
While it’s reasonable to ask, as Lyn at Public Opinion does, whether tracing every twist and turn of the opposition’s twisted trajectory towards some sort of agreed position on an emissions trading scheme, is to pay too much attention to a “policy cycle of sometimes less than 24 hours [which stretches] the notion of novelty a little far.” However, it could also be suggested that the interest lies in watching the moment that a “media narrative” switches, and as with the Costello crud, observing the process of constructing one, as a few bits and pieces of disconnected nonsense get tied together by assorted columnists and reporters and woven into a new thread that will then become - hey presto! - conventional wisdom, dignified as such on Sundays by the usual Insider suspects. You can shine a light on the way the press gallery mob do “the wisdom of crowds each other” by building a story arc, which then shapes the way the story is moved on.
Continue reading ‘Liberal media lunacy III’
Brendan Nelson’s office is denying reports - discussed on an earlier post - that he will be having a “showdown” with Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt over the Coalition’s stance on emissions trading.
Some were reporting yesterday that Nelson would next week “take on” Malcolm Turnbull over climate change. His office claims that is “nonsense” and, given his tenuous hold on the leadership, it does seem unlikely he would be seeking a showdown with anyone. But he and Turnbull are “consulting”, which suggests he is trying to inch the party as far as he can towards a more sceptical line, in a bid to keep everyone happy.
However, Nelson is apparently “negotiating” with Turnbull to “harden” the Coalition’s position, and in an attempt to keep the denialists in his ranks happy, came out with this gem:
Now Nelson’s rhetoric is sounding more sceptical again. “I see there is an emerging body of scientific opinion which questions the role of carbon in all of this, but I’m strongly of the view that we give the planet the benefit of the doubt,” he said yesterday.
Sure, scientists differ about the degree and speed of global warming, but if it is not caused by carbon, why on earth are we contemplating support for an emissions trading scheme at all?
Quite. And that difference is between more catastrophic and slightly less catastrophic outlooks. Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy II’
Tim Watts has posted at Tree of Knowledge on Andrew Bolt’s claim that the forces of the hardline right in the Liberal Party are planning to monster Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt and push for an oppositional stance to the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme. Brendan Nelson’s latest confused comments about delaying the ETS might be some confirmation of this, but on the other hand Nelson’s line on climate change is a moveable feast at the best of times, and Turnbull was singing from the same song sheet today. Watts is no doubt right that such a stance would be political stupidity on the part of the opposition, but it’s just as likely that the story represents wishful thinking on Bolt’s part, obsessed as he is with climate change denialism. However, nutty calls from the Nats for a Royal Commission to examine the science certainly do highlight the continuing divisions within the Coalition.
Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy’
The government’s green paper on the ETS postpones discussion on actual emissions targets, and says nothing about the government’s negotiating position on a post-Kyoto agreement. While Garnaut’s draft report has similarly postponed discussion of domestic targets, he does have a fair bit to say about how targets might be allocated amongst nations in such an agreement, and how those targets might be structured in a way that actually drags the the big developing countries in.
According to Chapter 12, the world has essentially decided on a path where each participating nation will have targets allocated to it. Nations unable to meet their target will be able to buy permits from nations that go under theirs. But the key question is, of course, how these targets should be set, whether all nations should face the same form of targets, and what form of carrots and sticks would apply to encourage countries to meet the targets.
Continue reading ‘Garnaut - the international perspective’
Peter Martin has an excellent column today pointing out what’s wrong with the dollops of dollars which are to be handed out to polluters under the Rudd government’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.
Australia’s existing coal-fired power stations won’t need the compensation anyway. They will be able to pass on the extra cost of the emission permits. They will be encouraged to. It is how the scheme is meant to work.
Eventually the higher price of power will prod some of us to use less of it, and eventually wind and commercial solar power generators will become competitive against coal because they won’t to buy emission permits.
Martin effortlessly and elegantly skewers the arguments for compensation.
He also refers to the GST. It’s interesting that this whole exercise has been framed as “economic reform” and compared so often to the GST. It would seem that it’s that template and that framing which has given overt permission for a rent-seekers’ paradise, and as Martin argues, has created the extraordinary situation where the profits of pollution are essentially being treated as property rights.
Continue reading ‘ETS or business welfare?’
This was my response to the argument that Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme Green Paper was a fine piece of pragmatic politics: Continue reading ‘He’s from Queensland and he’s here to help cave in before the debate starts’
It sounds like some dumb reality tv show, doesn’t it? But we all know who didn’t get voted out of the house.
As almost everyone in the world knows, it’s election year in America.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t ask, you already know the answer!) might be in trouble. Iraq might be - kinda, sorta - an election issue. But if - like me - you’re following the American Election via either the blogosphere or (oh noes!) the MSM, you’d notice a huge disconnect between how big an issue climate change is here, and how totally miniscule it is in the U S of A.
I hope Al Gore might have something to say at the Democratic Convention.
But that might not occur. And even if it does, and that and all the Arnie stuff aside, it’s going to be pretty much a side issue. Lord only knows what we can do, but those of us who, like me, are Democrats Overseas, might consider a bit of lobbying. But we might think as well about remembering that climate change is a global issue, and trying to get the Australian government to use whatever leverage it has to get it treated as such. Continue reading ‘The World’s Top Emitter’
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