Monthly Archives: May 2014

Politics & Government, Social Science and Society

On a mission to upset everyone

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Having upset the rich with their ‘debt levy’, and with 72% of people thinking it a broken promise, Abbott and Hockey are on a mission to upset the rest of us by re-indexing the fuel excise.

Richard Denniss told the 7.30 Report that the tax was good policy.

Sinclair Davidson told Waleed Aly that if you must tax, then taxing consumption is better than taxing production. The fuel excise taxes consumption. He forgets that sole traders (like me) driving a ute or a van would pay the tax. Nevertheless the LNP backbencher Ken O’Dowd in the linked article appears to be wrong:

A Federal Government MP has spoken out against plans to raise the fuel excise, warning it will force up the cost of everyday groceries.

Farmers and miners don’t pay fuel excise. That tax concession is worth some $13 billion, which the Greens would like to abolish.

Davidson also pointed out that fuel excise was a regressive tax, it disadvantages the poor. Those with time to ring up are letting Mr O’Dowd know:

“The phones haven’t stopped, especially with our older folk. We got off on the wrong leg, talking about increasing the pension age, I don’t think it was explained too good. It really concerned a lot of old people that they were going to lose their rights.”

It hardly matters now what the budget detail turns out to be – the damage has been done.

Meanwhile company directors are losing faith. Only 30% of company directors expected the new administration to have a positive impact on their business decision making, down from 70% when the LNP took over. Furthermore:

This loss of confidence has also translated into a fall in the proportion of directors who believe the Federal Government understands business – from 55 per cent last year to 48 per cent now.

Fully 80% say that achieving a budget surplus in the next three years is not a priority.

Wayne Swan says he left the budget in good shape. Chris Bowen has been saying that Joe Hockey has doubled the deficit by changes to Government spending and changes to Government assumptions. The ABC FactCheck verdict:

Since the election, the official forecast deficit has doubled. The economic assumptions are different from those used before the election, and spending decisions have been made that were not in the previous forecasts. Mr Bowen’s claim checks out.

Here’s the table that tells the story:

PEFO_cropped_600

The PEFO of August 2013, prepared independently by Treasury and Finance, shows a surplus for 2016-17. Leaving aside Hockey’s moral austerity crusade, it does appear that he has confected the crisis.

Social Science and Society, Sundries

War is good for us!

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Eventually, that is. Unless we are killed, starved, raped, maimed, robbed or otherwise damaged in the process.

The proposition is simple:

War has been good for something: it has produced bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity.

Through war humanity is now safer and richer than ever before.

That’s the central thesis of historian Ian Morris’s book War! What Is It Good For? according to his article in the New Scientist (paywalled). (There is a similar article in the Chicago Tribune.)

Mind you he says “war is probably the worst way imaginable to create larger, more peaceful societies” but “it is pretty much the only way humans have found.”

From our position in the 21st century we see the 20th century as the most violent ever. Indeed, Morris says, we killed between 100 and 200 million of our own kind. Yet 10 billion lives were lived in that century, meaning the the death rate from violence was only 2 to 3 per cent.

By contrast in the Stone Age an estimated 10 to 20% of people died at the hands of another human. Comparable was the experience of the Serbs in WW1 where one in six perished.

In traditional societies:

Most of the killing was on a small scale, in homicides, vendettas and raids, but because populations were also small, the steady drip of low-level killing took an appalling toll.

This graphic shows ‘progress’ over the millennia:

Violent deaths _29650201_450_cropped

Since 2000, the United Nations tells us, the risk of violent death has fallen still further, to 0.7 per cent.

Ten thousand years ago people lived on average 30 years and got by on the equivalent of less than $2 per day. Now the respective global averages are 67 years and $25 per day.

Morris says that virtually every species is programmed for violence. Fukuyama in his The Origin of Political Order quotes archaeologist Stephen LeBlanc:

Much of noncomplex society human warfare is similar to chimpanzee attacks. Massacres among humans at the social level are, in fact, rare occurrences, and victory by attrition is a viable strategy, as are buffer zones, surprise raids, taking captive females into the group, and mutilation of victims. The chimp and human behaviors are almost completely parallel.

Humans, however, with more lethal weapons were more deadly.

Jared Diamond in his book The World Until Yesterday has several chapters on war, but I’d like to quote a study he cites of homicide over the period 1920-1969 amongst the !Kung people in the Kalahari. The !Kung are recognised as peaceable people.

The study identified 22 killing over 49 years, or less than one every two years. It’s just that the population under study was only around 1500. That makes the homicide rate triple that of the United States and 10 to 30 times that of rates for Canada, Britain, France and Germany.

Killing was a norm and in that society.

The graphic shows an increase in violent deaths during what Morris terms the ‘age of migrations’, from AD200-1400. This was a time when Fukuyama would say social/political organisation in Europe had moved beyond the tribal, but had not yet achieved the form of the modern state. It was not a time when the state competently and fairly extracted taxes from all and applied them consistently for the general good. Tom Holland in his book Millennium describes how rulers saw it as their mission to Christianise the heathen but they did this by plundering and bringing home the loot. There was a zero sum attitude to economic growth. You accrued great wealth by taking it from other people.

Castles became popular in the tenth century, not to guard against external threat, but as a base to plunder and extract tribute from the surrounding countryside. Knights were the primary agents, mailed thugs and at that time, Holland says, by definition in a state of sin.

People became increasingly competent at conducting war, with a map that was extremely fluid. During the Thirty Years War German territories lost about a third of their population. In Brandenburg, the seed state of Prussia, it was a half. Yet between times there were periods of peace and prosperity, with an increasing idea that the competent state was there to serve the welfare of the people.

Morris says we used war and killing, because for humans it was the only way. What he doesn’t appear to emphasise is the other side of human nature, the co-operative, altruistic side, which on his evidence is gradually triumphing.

By some counts we have only had the modern state in its full form since WW1.

I could be doing Morris an injustice, as I have not read the book. In The Wall Street Journal Felipe Fernadez-Armesto has some reservations.

Climate Action, Climate Science

Climate clippings 95

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Climate clippings_175

1. Pacific winds slow global warming

A team of Australian scientists has found that stronger winds in the Pacific are slowing global warming (paper here, paywalled).

The study found that the winds were churning the Pacific like a washing machine, bringing the deeper colder water to the surface and pushing the warmer water below.

Scientists do not expect the effect to last. Matthew England of the University of New South Wales:

“The phase we’re in of accelerated trade winds particularly lasts a couple of decades,” Professor England said.

“We’re about 12 to 13 years in to the most accelerated part of the wind field.”

There’s more at The Conversation, at Open Mind plus Matthew England at RealClimate and Mike Mann at Huff Post.

The heat is only at a depth of 100 to 300m, so may easily become available to the atmosphere again. Mike Mann thinks the winds and the La Niña effect may be the result of global warming.

2. Animals and plants on the move

The CSIRO have developed a fascinating map showing species on the move due to climate change. I’ve done a screenshot here, but the animated version in the link is best:

species migration copy_cropped

Blue areas indicate significant change and pink areas show “corridors” where animals and plants may be able to move through to more favourable conditions.

“Sink” areas, in orange, show where the movement of land-based species is likely to hit a dead end, by reaching a coastline or mountain range.

Something strange is happening in the middle of Queensland.

3. The year’s weather in 8 minutes

Gareth at Hot Topic has posted a live map of the weather for 2013 as seen from weather satellites. I recommend using the full screen button.

It’s interesting not so much for 2013, but as an overview of how the global system works.

4. Half new energy is green

Fully 44% of all generating capacity installed last year around the world was renewable, says the latest UNEP Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment, despite a 14% decline in renewables investment, and in new electricity generally.

Europe has cut investment in renewables by 44%. China now leads with $56 billion invested last year.

Shares in clean energy companies rose 54% last year.

5. Germany turns to brown coal

Germany has more wind turbines and solar panels than any other industrialised country, but it also burns more brown coal (lignite) than any other.

As Germany turns off its nuclear power, gas is expensive and a third of it comes from Russia. In these circumstances Germany is turning to lignite to solve the intermittency problem. Because lignite takes 8 hours to fire up plants are run at 40% whether needed or not.

There are three options:

  • storage systems, such as pumped water or hydrogen
  • improving and extending electricity grids so that surpluses can be moved to areas of need
  • organising tariffs to manage demand from big energy users that have intermittent demand.

None of these is being implemented so far to the extent that makes a real difference.

6. Energy use in UK and Germany

Germany generates considerably more energy than the UK, even when population is taken into account.

This graph shows the source of Germany’s power generation for the first quarter of 2014:

Germany_screen-shot-2014-04-30-at-153528_549x170

Nuclear, being phased out over a decade, is a considerable source. Biomass is larger than gas.

Renewable energy is expected to be the main source of electricity generation in Germany by 2030, but policy in both countries is a concern:

In the UK, the Conservative party has recently announced that it will put a cap on onshore wind expansion if it gets into power in 2015. Subsidies for solar power are also likely to be cut, according to media reports – suggesting that Conservatives are increasingly hostile to plans to expand renewables.

In Germany, the government’s putting in place a new renewables plan – possibly in response to concern about rising energy prices. The new rules mean from 2017 energy providers will no longer get guaranteed prices for their power, according to media reports. The effects are unclear, but could slow the growth of German green energy.

7. But then, in Germany at least…

…energy policy is very complex.

In Germany governments attempt to control markets, it seems.

Germany’s energy transition – the Energiewende – has largely been a bottom-up grassroots movement over the past 25 years. Citizens and energy cooperatives account for roughly half the investments. Large utilities are only just now getting on board.

Current changes in policy are aimed at tipping the balance back towards the large corporates, while keeping renewable energy development on track. Policy is also favouring offshore rather than onshore wind.

The article mentions that discussion will now turn to “capacity payments”. I suspect such payments will be necessary to provide backup capacity for intermittency problems, especially if weather forecasts are wrong. For continuity of supply the corporates may have to be paid for unused reserve capacity.

Reminder: Use this thread as an open thread on climate change.

Politics & Government, Social Science and Society, Sundries

Beware of right wing revolutionaries calling themselves conservatives

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Rob Burgess had an interesting post in the May 2 Business Spectator on the commision of audit.  He discusses the competing, and very different ideological positions dividing the political right  as well as pointing out that “Australia has more to lose from radical change than just about any country in the world.”
The competing ideological divisions within the right wing of Australian politics might be described as:

  1. The revolutionary neo-liberal position that says that “the system is fundamentally flawed and needs fixing.”   Their preferred fix are the radical steps required to remove the the restraints on our economy caused by the “dead hand of government.” Vs
  2. The conservative liberal position that says we are actually doing quite well and we should limit our efforts to incremental change.   They might say something like: “In this situation it doesn’t make sense to be risking our gains by making unnecessarily dramatic changes.  If you like: “If it aint broke why fix it?””

There is a similar division on the left of politics between those who want radical change (Think the end of capitalism) and those who favour incremental improvements.

The key question here is whether the current state of the Australian economy really justifies the sort of radical fix advocated by the Audit Commission.  A comparison between Australia and other developed countries might be a good start:

  1. According to The Conversation, Commonwealth net debt “is about 11% of GDP, the third lowest in the OECD (the average is 50%), and low by historical standards”    Not a crisis. 
  2. Rob Burgess provided the following:
    • Combined federal, state and local tax rates ran at a bit over 30 per cent during the Howard years, dropping to  about 27 per cent during the Rudd/Gillard years. (State taxes account for around 4 per cent of GDP, and local taxes (rates) hover around 1 per cent of GDP.)  By comparison, Singapore’s total tax-to-GDP ratio is around 14 per cent, the US 27 per cent, Switzerland 29 per cent, and Canada 32 per cent.  Not a crisis  but it would be interesting to know the reasons behind the low Singaporean rate.  It is worth noting that people may actually be better off in a “high taxing” country if the high taxes mean that the state pays for services that other, lower taxing countries make people pay for themselves.

    • In terms of GDP corrected for purchasing power parity (PPP) we rank 10th on the World Bank and IMF scales. We could do better.  A key factor here is how expensive it is to rent/buy a house in Australia compared with places like the US or Spain where house prices were really hit by the GFC.  In our case, the problem really took off when Peter Costello offered negative gearing to people who could afford to borrow money to buy investment properties.  His first home buyer schemes also tended to push up the price of houses rather than help first home buyers.   However, fixing home prices is no win territory.  It is a bit challenging to please existing homeowners and new home buyers at the same time when it comes to prices.

    • Australia does much better when we use the ‘human development index’, which factors in longevity (as a proxy for good health), educational attainment, gross national income and, in recent years, measures of inequality. On that scale we jostle for the number one spot with Norway. Not 6th or 10th. Number one.  Definitely not a crisis.

    • Best news of all is that last year’s Credit Suisse survey  showed Australia having the highest median wealth per adult citizen of any nation.  Definitely not a crisis although inflated home prices may have helped a bit here.

Conclusion: Australia’s alleged budget crisis is either the product of a fevered imagination or a deliberate attempt by neo-liberals to justify the imposition of their questionable ideas.

None of this mean that there aren’t many things in Australia that would benefit from radical change.  However, the case for these radical changes should be justified by fact based, logical conversations about the specific issues.  Definitely not based on ideological assertions about the dead hand of governments or private is best.

Life, Sundries

Saturday Salon

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voltaire_230

An open thread where, at your leisure, you can discuss anything you like, well, within reason and the Comments Policy. Include here news and views, plus any notable personal experiences from the week and the weekend.

For climate topics please use the most recent Climate clippings.

The gentleman in the image is Voltaire, who for a time graced the court of Frederick II of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great. King Fred loved to talk about the universe and everything at the end of a day’s work. He also used the salons of Berlin to get feedback in the development of public policy.

Fred would only talk in French; he regarded German as barbaric. Here we’ll use English.

The thread will be a stoush-free zone. The Comments Policy says:

The aim [of this site] is to provide a venue for people to contribute and to engage in a civil and respectful manner.

Climate Action, Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

Climate change impacts: IPCC Working Party 2 report

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On 31 March the IPCC released its second report in the current series, this one on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Follow the links from the report website. We looked at the first report, The Physical Science Basis here, here and here. The third report, Mitigation of Climate Change is now also out, and the final Synthesis Report is scheduled for in September. The series comprises the Fifth Assessment Report.

The IPCC was formed in 1988 and produced assessment reports in 1990, 1995 and 2007. As Graham Readfearn says, the message is the same – we are going to hell in a handbasket – and yes, at that level it’s becoming monotonous.

There is a change, however. It lies in the fact that the impacts of climate change are now all around us. We are not just getting warnings, we are living climate change. The impacts we see locally are integrating into a global pattern, which also includes large-scale transforming events, such as the drying of the Sahel and the loss of sea ice in the Arctic. Increased extreme weather is becoming part of the common experience. In this we are on a path where one in 100 events in any year may become one in three or five. We risk losing whole ecosystems such as the coral reefs where many are in trouble now and all will be by about mid-century, almost certainly. Finally, there is much greater certainty that climate change is happening and about our agency in it. With that certainty comes greater risk, but also opportunity to take action to adapt and to mitigate.

I’ve patterned that paragraph on Greg Picker’s explanation to Steve Austin, while changing the order of the points he made and adding some detail.

The report is organised into two “volumes”, with the first containing 20 chapters, including, for example, one on Human health: impacts, adaptation, and co-benefits and one on Human security. These sectoral reports will provide valuable reference material for years to come.

The second volume comprises 10 “regional aspects” including the ocean.

One of the 10 is on Australasia.

Impacts on Australia

Chapter 25 identifies eight significant impacts for Australia:

  • There is the possibility of widespread and permanent damage to coral reef systems, particularly the Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo in Western Australia.
  • Some native species could be wiped out.
  • There is the chance of more frequent flooding causing damage to key infrastructure.
  • In some areas, unprecedented rising sea levels could inundate low-lying areas.
  • In other areas, bushfires could result in significant economic losses.
  • More frequent heatwaves and temperatures may lead to increased morbidity – especially among the elderly.
  • Those same rising temperatures could put constraints on water resources.
  • Farmers could face significant drops in agriculture – especially in the Murray-Darling Basin.

University of Queensland marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg worries that reefs could be severely damaged or disappear by mid-century.

A worst case scenario could see agricultural production reduce by 40% in the Murray-Darling Basin, and in south-east and south-west Australia. The National Irrigators Council says that’s why you have irrigation. However, there is a lot of dry-land farming in these areas and the future average rain is more likely to come in the form of floods when most of the water flows through to the sea.

The above scenarios are risks rather than certainties. However, they add up to a strong chance of dangerous climate change.

Increased certainty

The change in certainty in the attribution of climate change to human activity is conveyed in this image from Dr Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog last year:

IPCC_version95_600

Back in 1990 we saw the possibility of continuing change but what we had experienced at that time could easily have been natural variations subject to reversal. In any case there was low confidence that we could do anything to mitigate. Furthermore, why take measures to adapt, when there was no real certainty?

Now the story has changed dramatically. The pattern and the dominant causes are clear.

Adaptation

From page 27 of the Summary for Policymakers we find a graphic packed with information about various aspects of the impacts of climate change (sorry the graphic is too large to display here!) In the right hand column we find bar graphs showing the present, near-term (2030-2040) and the long-term (2080-2100) risk with hatching to show potential for mitigation through adaptation. The long-term risk is displayed in separate 2°C and 4°C bars.

Little adaptation is possible with Australia’s coral reefs, none at 4°C when the risk becomes very high.

Terrestrial ecosystems losing ice cover in the polar regions are similarly not amenable to adaptation and become very high risk at 4°C.

Loss of crop productivity becomes very high risk at 4°C with little possibility of adaptation. Ditto for heat-related mortality in Asia, North America and, presumably, elsewhere.

Burning embers

The extensive detail in these tables is summarised in a new improved version of the ‘burning embers’ diagram, shown below:

Burning embers_cropped

From this we can readily see that the 2°C ‘guardrail’ marks a fairly arbitrary point on the gradation from dire to downright dangerous.

Politics & Government, Social Science and Society

Elites rule

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The USA can no longer be considered a democracy, according to a Princeton University study. Researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page argue that America’s political system is effectively an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most power.

Using data drawn from over 1,800 different policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, the two conclude that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of or even against the will of the majority of voters

They say:

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” they write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

This phenomenon has been a long term trend, at least from 1980, with no difference depending whether Democrats or Republicans were in power. The phenomenon is therefore part of the natural order of things, hard to perceive let alone change.

Ordinary folk also have wins, but only when the elites agree.

Questions raised include why, how do you define ‘elite’ and is the American experience replicated here?

As to why, I can only point to two factors. Firstly, the lobbying industry is alive and well. Big Pharma are said to have more lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are politicians.

Secondly, I recall in reading about trade matters some 10 years ago that very few Democrat senators were not dependent on business support to finance their campaigns.

In this interview author Martin Gilens identifies the role money plays in the political system and the lack of mass organizations that represent and facilitate the voice of ordinary citizens. Interestingly they found that

policies adopted during presidential election years in particular are more consistent with public preferences than policies adopted in other years of the electoral cycle.

As to defining elites, I would have been interested in the policy preferences of the top one or two percent, who are the real elites in my book. This exchange was enlightening:

Would you say the government is most responsive to income earners at the top 10 percent, the top 1 percent or the top 0.1 percent?

This is a great question and it’s not one we can answer with the data that we used in the study. Because we really don’t have good info about what the top 1 percent or 10 percent want or what issues they’re engaged with. As you can imagine, this is not really a group that’s eager to talk with researchers.

John Davidson drew to my attention this post by Matt Cowgill. Defining the elite by income is no simple matter.

First we have perceptions of income versus reality:

income-perceptions
Some 83% of people think they’re in the middle four deciles of the income distribution, whereas by definition only 40% can be. It seems most of us think we are middle class. The rich especially have little idea of how privileged they are.

Cowgill leads us through the complexities of analysing wage and income distribution. Of most interest was this table which takes into account household circumstances:

Household incomes_cropped

In terms of straight taxable income the top 10% cut in at about $105,000. If we are to do similar research to the Princeton study in Australia, I’d suggest targeting senior executives, I’m guessing in the range of $200,000 plus. They are likely to sit in the top 5% of incomes. They are also likely to reflect the views of the top 2% whose views Gilens found to be unknowable.

If government is to be accountable to the electors, then the Princeton research suggests that universal franchise is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy. We need to think carefully about how democracy works, lest we be left with the form rather than the substance.