Time for Tony Abbott to admit his climate policy is crap

June 6, 2014 Brian 7 Comments

That is Giles Parkinson’s advice to Abbott.

Parkinson says Australia should be embarrassed by its lack of action compared to the United States and China, which has indicated it will place a cap on its emissions as soon as 2016.

Ironically, Abbott could have a pretty good collection of climate and renewable energy policies just by doing nothing. Everything Labor put in place is still there, apart from Tim Flannery and the Climate Commission, which has morphed into the Climate Council with private money and public donations.

The carbon price is still there, the renewable energy target can still deliver more than a 20 per cent share of wind, solar, hydro and biomass, and push more coal- and gas-fired generation out of the market.

Even the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, with a $10 billion budget that will hasten new technologies and deliver abatement and profits to the government, and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, with money to spend on new technologies such as this groundbreaking solar thermal plant, and the first large scale solar and storage plant for a major mining operation, are still in operation.

So, too, is the Climate Change Authority. And by a strange quirk of fate, the country’s official emissions reduction target has jumped to 18.9 per cent, the result of some forward thinking policy wonks who decided to lock in Australia’s prior climate commitments in the case of a political stalemate.

Around 19 per cent is exactly what the CCA, and many others, say is Australia’s fair share, given the developments overseas.

Abbott_4918428-3x2-197

So what sort of fool would want to tear these policies down? Pretty much the sort whose ideology and vested interests makes him blind to the fact that business as usual is neither credible, nor possible.

Not everyone in the Liberal Party is happy:

As one Liberal Party observer noted this week: “Clearly, there are enough sitting Liberal members that reject the Americanisation of Australia’s social values.

“There are enough who understand science and research and the importance of science and research to Australia’s well being. There are enough who are sick of the Liberal brand being trashed by climate deniers within the party.”

A voting block of around 16 would do the trick – that’s less than the number of Coalition MPs under threat in marginal seats. What could possibly be the downside?

Bring on the revolution, Abbott must go!

It’s all very well for some Liberal pollies to have a conscience. None of them seems to have the bottle to do anything that might lead to change.

Time to stop dreaming. Greg Hunt, Abbott’s climate poodle, plays with the figures, stretches things a bit and concludes that the US and Australia have very similar positions.

The real fun begins when they sit down with Clive Palmer, who thinks all the carbon ‘tax’ collected should be reimbursed to the polluters.

Also I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall when Abbott sits down with Obama and discusses whether climate change should be on the G20 agenda. Surely if Obama is serious about climate change he’ll give Abbott an offer he can’t refuse. Like why would Obama bother coming if important stuff is left off the agenda.

Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

The game is up

June 5, 2014 Brian 3 Comments

In the post A choice of catastrophes: the IPCC budget approach I explained the socalled ‘carbon budget approach’ in some detail. In general terms:

In a warming world what matters is the total quantum of CO2 in the atmosphere. The ‘climate budget approach’ identifies the total anthropogenic CO2 emitted to cause warming of 2°C. For a 66% chance of staying under 2°C the total CO2 emitted must not exceed 1000Gt, according to calculations done by Malte Meinshausen and others back in 2009. The later we leave cutting the harder we have to cut.

Rahmstorf’s budget was about 1000Gt of CO2 or about 1500GT of CO2 equivalent with other greenhouse gases for a 25% chance of staying within 2°C. Then

as Giles Parkinson reports, the carbon budget figures have taken a haircut to become 800Gt for a 66% chance of 2°C when “accounting for non-CO2 forcings”. Problem is we’d already used up 543Gt of the budget by 2011.

David Spratt now tells it straight: Continue reading The game is up →

Politics & Government

Hockey’s debt and deficit mess

June 4, 2014 Brian 44 Comments

In their usual sloganeering fashion Abbott, Hockey, Cormann and others constantly refer to the ‘budget debt and deficit mess’ (or disaster) they inherited from Labor. In the post Resolving the budget ‘crisis’ I attempted to show that Labor left the budget in reasonably good shape. In so far as there is a mess or a crisis now, the author is Hockey and company.

From comments I may have not made the case plain. In what I hope is my last post on the budget of 2014, I lay out the case again, with additional information.

In the 2013 budget Wayne Swan went beyond the usual four-year projections to lay out expected receipts and payments over 10 years. He did this to reflect how the numbers would work out, given that the major payments for Gonski and NDIS did not cut in until after the four-year budget cycle. Swan left the budget in good fiscal shape.

When Bowen and Rudd took over from Swan/Gillard they had to rejig the budget to accommodate the early change from a fixed carbon price to carbon trading, plus some new policies. Labor’s legacy is reflected in the Pre-Election Fiscal Outlook (PEFO) prepared independently by Treasury and Finance and published under the charter of budget honesty in August 2013 before the last election is shown:

This graph has the budget back in surplus in 2015-16, an ongoing surplus of about 1% of GDP (about $16 billion) and a restoration of budget receipts to about 25% of GDP. The forecast assumed no tax cuts to offset bracket creep. In effect the government would take back some of the eight tax cuts delivered by Costello and the one delivered by Rudd.

Six years of Labor had seen debt increase through the unaffordable tax cuts and Keynesian stimulation to counter the GFC. Nevertheless debt was modest by international standards.

Here’s Labor’s debt in context:

Hockey has done three main things.

First, he has added $68 billion in debt over the four-year budget cycle.

Second, he has delayed major cuts until the fourth year, as Ross Gittins has pointed out. (Ironically he has done this to stimulate the economy in transition from reliance on the resources boom. In fact consumer confidence tanked from the pre-budget talk of austerity and remains at levels of the 1991 recession.) Hence the budget does not reach surplus until 2016-17, one year later than Labor.

Third, Hockey has restrained receipts to 23.9% of GDP, according to Gittins, one election promise he has kept. Hockey has put the budget into a straight jacket entirely of his own making. This decision is based on his austerity/small government ideology.

The transition from Swan to Bowen to Hockey is reflected in this graph a form of which was published in the AFR at the time of the Mid-Year Forecast and Economic Outlook (MYEFO) last December.

Swan’s embarrassment and a fair bit of the negative view of Labor’s reputation as an economic manager is reflected in the difference between MYEFO for 2012 and the 2013 budget. Swan/Gillard had bravely forecast a budget surplus for 2012-13, but had to give up and defer for two years because of failing revenue. Treasury and Finance seemed to be completely blindsided by what was going on but the repeated failure of revenue to meet forecasts made the government look incompetent.

I understand revenue picked up a bit in the weeks before PEFO 2013, mainly due to better receipts from the mining and carbon taxes. I believe it was stable between PEFO 2013, Labor’s legacy, and MYEFO 2013, Hockey’s mess.

You will recall that the from ABC Factcheck confirmed Bowen’s contention that Hockey added $68 billion of debt to the forward estimates:

In the overall narrative the focus should be on what Hockey has done in increasing the deficit and in establishing a 23.9% of GDP limit on receipts. Instead we have sloganeering and a welter of numbers in an attempt to sheet home the entire blame to Labor. The LNP keeps saying that they gave us the budget the country needed and that there was no choice. There was choice in the overall budget framework as well as the allocations within it, which privileges the rich and the corporates and punished everyone else. Infrastructure and defence have also received increases, beyond normal inflation, though the former is limited to roads, neglecting public transport.

One sloganeering tactic is to state (true) that we are paying $1 billion in interest every month, and then rattle off what could be achieved with $12 billion extra in the budget. This entirely overlooks the need for debt to counter the GFC and the state we would have been in had we followed LNP policies.

Another is to say that if nothing were done then in 10 years the debt would be $667 billion pa. No economic commentator has had a good look at this claim, but it’s based on the Hockey mess, not Labor’s as such.

Based on that $667 number, they now have dazzled everyone with a ‘blizzard’, to borrow Bernard Keane’s description, of numbers derived from it. The interest bill becomes $2.8 billion per month, or $25,000 for each man, woman and child in the country, $100,000 for a family of four. Each Australian’s share of the interest would be $9,400 over the next 10 years, and so on and on.

Keane says it’s a Howard trick, although Howard had the gumption to stick to one number. Does anyone remember the ‘Beazley black hole’, the gigantic deficit left to the Howard government in 1996? This graph shows the budget balance history going back to when Howard was treasurer:

The graph is interactive. I’ve taken a screen shot with the blue marker bar over the socalled “Beazley black hole” It wasn’t a black hole and it wasn’t even Beazley’s as he was finance minister; Ralph Willis was treasurer. The deficit in that year was a benign 1.1% of GDP.

[This graph has replaced the less good one I had in the original post.]

The Tories have form, they specialise in lies. I’m inclined to think this present lot are liars, clunkheads or both, Laura Tingle’s assessment in 2010, and unfit for government.

Update: ABC FactCheck have done a thorough analysis of Hockey’s claim that

“At the moment we’re paying a billion dollars a month – one billion dollars every month in interest, in interest on the debt that Labor has left.”

Labor only incurred 75% of the current debt and there is a difference between gross debt and net debt. The verdict:

Using either gross debt or net debt, Mr Hockey’s claim that at the moment Australia is paying a billion dollars every month in interest on the debt that Labor left is exaggerated.

A nice way of saying he’s lying.

Previous posts on Budget 2014:

On a mission to upset everyone

Budget explainer

A crisis in trust

Shredding the fig leaf

Poll anger or a shift in the tectonic plates?

To GST or not to GST

Cap super, says Richard Denniss

Resolving the budget ‘crisis’

See also especially Hockey’s morality play.

Climate Action, Climate Science

Climate clippings 98

June 3, 2014 Brian 6 Comments

This edition includes important updates on Greenland and Antarctica, global food supply, CSIRO cuts, CO2 levels moving decisively past 400 ppm and CO2 compared to global temperature rise.

1. Greenland may melt faster than expected

You may recall from the post Arctic images I included an image of the underlying topography of Greenland (Figure 5). It is saucer-like with large areas inland below sea level. The glaciers tend to drain through narrow gateways in the external rim. So they tend to be narrow and fast-flowing:

The mouths of most glaciers are melting from contact with warmer seas. It was felt that as this process continued the ice would lose contact with the water, slowing the melting.

New studies of the topography have shown that many of these channels are below sea level.

Valleys underlying many of the glaciers stay below sea level and extend much farther inland than previously suggested, so warm ocean currents that have migrated northward with the changing climate could eat away at the ice for much longer than current climate models suggest. “It will take much longer for these glaciers to lose contact with the ocean,” study author Mathieu Morlighem, of the University of California, Irvine, told Climate Central.

2. Melting Antarctica could devastate global food supply

A new report is the “first to factor in the effects of the slow-motion collapse of the Western Antarctica ice sheet on future food security.”

About time, I’d say.

The report acknowledges recent findings that that the retreat of the Western Antarctica ice sheet was unstoppable – and could lead to sea-level rise of up to 4 metres over the coming centuries.

“That sea-level rise would take out half of Bangladesh and mostly wipe out productive rice regions in Vietnam,” Nelson told The Guardian. “It would have a major effect on Egyptian agricultural areas.”

“A sea level rise of 3 meters (10 feet) over the next 100 years is much more likely than the IPCC thought possible,” the report said.

In terms of absolute land loss, China would be at risk of losing more than 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres). Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, and Myanmar could lose more than 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres), the report said.

The report recommends a radical increase in expenditure on agricultural research, which has been in decline everywhere over recent decades.

3. CSIRO cuts

The federal government cut CSIRO’s funding by $111 million over four years, which will result in 500 job cuts.

Dr Borgas [president of the CSIRO Staff Association] said a plan to move the Aspendale Laboratories to the organisation’s larger site in Clayton had been previously discussed but had come to nothing.

He said it was unclear whether the relocation would reduce the research performed by the 130 staff, which includes ice core analysis, air quality and pollution research and climate and atmospheric modelling.

Most countries planning for a future increase their scientific research funding.

4. CO2 levels decisively pass 400 ppm

During April all 12 World Meteorological Organisation northern hemisphere monitoring stations passed the 400 ppm mark, the first time ever. This is how such a level compares to the 800,000 year ice core record:

When was it last this high? Possibly 15 million years ago, when it was warmer and there wasn’t much ice around.

“This was a time when global temperatures were substantially warmer than today, and there was very little ice around anywhere on the planet. And so sea level was considerably higher — around 100 feet [30 metres] higher — than it is today,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, in an email conversation. “It is for this reason that some climate scientists, like James Hansen, have argued that even current-day CO2 levels are too high. There is the possibility that we’ve already breached the threshold of truly dangerous human influence on our climate and planet.”

5. Global temperature and CO2

I came across this graph from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center plotting CO2 levels against temperature rise. While correlation does not mean causation there is simply no alternative explanation.

If you take out 1998, which can be regarded as an outlier, the socalled ‘pause’ is only apparent from 2005, which is too short a time to mean anything.

There is another view which sees temperature responding in step-wise fashion. On that basis we may be due for another step, and with an El Niño likely…

Here’s one showing the ten warmest years on record, all since 1998:

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

Life

A Coast to Coast odyssey – Stage 1: St Bees to Cleator

June 2, 2014 Len Bahnisch 8 Comments

Our C2C journey has finally begun! There have been times over the last 2 years when I thought this day would never arrive. At 66 years of age, health issues are never far from your mind …. my father sadly died at this age from a ‘heart attack’. But my cardiologist says I’m good to go! Listen to your body, he says. ‘If you feel like you need a rest, then have one’ …. these were his parting words. Sounds like good advice for everyone to me, no matter what their age!

When I awoke at 4.00 am (all the excitement), it was raining!

But the rain eased and we enjoyed a cloudy, but mainly fine day.

So we departed our St Bees B&B, fortified with a full English breakfast and made our way down to the beach where the C2C starts. Tradition has it that, before you start, you should dip your toes (boots) in the Irish sea and select a small stone to carry to the east coast to cast into the North Sea at Robin Hoods Bay. Well …. we’ve started what may become a new tradition. As well as dipping our boots in the water, we selected three stones. The first was kissed with the second and then cast into the Irish Sea. The second was secreted in each of our packs to be carried across England and then cast into the North Sea. This will mark the conclusion of our C2C Odyssey at Robin Hoods Bay. And the carefully selected third stone is a keeper (don’t worry, there are tons of rocks on the beach!). So our journey begins ….

Here are three members of our team completing this ritual. Doug, the Soil Scientist in our group would have no part in it. It’s just not right to mess with the geology of England by carrying rocks from one side of the country to the other! And as for carrying rocks to the other side of the world!

Then it was off to have the obligatory picture taken at the official starting point for the walk (see featured image) and we were on our way.

First we had to make our way up to the top of the St Bees headland, an ascent of about 100 m. Then it was time to take a last look at the lovely St Bees and we were on our way.

It was close to high tide when we left, so there was only a rocky shore. But when Julia Bradbury was here filming her 6 part TV series on the C2C (as screened on SBS several years ago), the tide was out, so there were several hundred metres of sand to traverse to reach the water’s edge. No such problems for us!

The outstanding feature of our first day was the magnificent walk along the St Bees Head cliff-top.My co-walkers were setting a brisk pace, heading towards the first inlet in the headland – Fleswick Bay. This is an area noted for its abundant birdlife on the cliffs. And our first glimpse of the St Bees Lighthouse can be seen in the distance.

The views of the cliffs are simply spectacular. And the bird-life is a twitcher’s paradise. I know very little about birds, but enjoyed the spectacle of it, and captured a few images as we moved along.

At one point, just beyond Fleswick Bay, a group of seagulls were hovering in the updraft of the cliff.

And a fight broke out immediately after this photo was taken! Different people walk at different speeds. But some seem to move so quickly that it is difficult to see how they can appreciate their surroundings. We called this group the Yorkshire fell flyers.

We saw them approaching us from a distance way back behind Fleswick Bay and pretty soon they were on our tails and pressing to get past ….. in an area where the path was very close to the cliff-top and quite dangerous. But we soon found a space to let them through.

The St Bees Lighthouse is interesting in that it was originally lit by burning coal. I’ve not heard of this before, but apparently it was upgraded following many complaints from mariners about the poor quality of the light that it produced. The facility is no longer staffed. Sadly tours of the lighthouse that were available to C2C walkers until recently are no longer offered.

There is always a fence along the cliff-top. Sometimes the path is on the land-ward side of the fence, as seen here. These are predominantly sheep pastures.

On other occasions, it is on the sea-ward side, and is quite dangerous in parts. But a constant delight is the wildflowers that can be seen growing on the seaward side where they are protected from grazing.

In this area, the pastures are mainly grazed by sheep. This little family seemed to be pretty content! and there were mainly twin lambs in this area – good genetics, I think.

And heading out into the Irish Sea, we saw a fishing trawler.

It may well have caught our dinner …. four of us later had seafood for our evening meal in a local pub in Cleator. In fact, Laurie declared that his Sea Bass dinner was the best meal he’d eaten since leaving home – even though he and Tricia had spent a week in Paris on the way to England!

A feature of our walking day is to boil the billy once or twice along the way.

We find this to be a pleasant and refreshing ritual.

Here, we were very close to an old quarry, the signal for us to turn east towards Robin Hoods Bay! The C2C path then took us along some local roads as well dedicated walking paths to the small village of Sandwith (Pron: Sanith). There was a pleasant village green and many attractive gardens. This was a rare sighting of tulips – surprising to us given the time of year.

There was also quite a crowd enjoying a convivial interlude outside the local pub on their Monday Bank Holiday (what’s that all about …. we’ve had a few explanations? But not sure?).

That’s our mob in the foreground having a little rest. Definitely no ales until the walking is done!

We were soon in the small village of Moor Row, close to Cleator. The final approach was along a very well constructed hiking and cycling path along a disused railway line. And lots of lovely trees and shrubs along the way as well. Should be more of them ….. nothing steep here!

We were all very pleased to see the sign for Jasmine House as our delightful overnight B&B hove into view.

Vital stats of Stage 1:

Distance – 14 km

Ascent – ca. 250 m

Level of difficulty – easy

Highlight – cliff-top walk

And finally, a note to long-suffering readers. I’m new to blogging and so I’m learning ‘on the job’, with no-one to point me in the right direction. Brian (my brother and the owner of this blog) kindly gave me a couple of quick lessons before I left home – without that I would have been sunk! But you’ll be pleased to know that I am starting to swim faster! As well, there has been no WiFi on several evenings, even in one case where the management claimed that my bedroom was the best place in the building to pick it up! I’m also working with a notebook computer with Windows RT on it – new to me and not the best for blogging, I suspect.

So please bear with me if you wish to follow this account of our remarkable journey! I’ll get the blogs up as quickly as I can. But I suggest that you subscribe to this blog page – then, you will get an email when new posts appear and you’ll be able to follow our progress as I get them up! (Too many exclamation marks, I know. But I’m having that sort of experience.)

Politics & Government

Brandis protects hate speech

June 2, 2014 Brian 5 Comments

During the last week in March, before this blog came to life, Attorney General George Brandis introduced to parliament an exposure draft of changes to the S18c of the Racial Discrimination Act. Brandis goes beyond everyone’s “right to be a bigot”. He seeks effectively to protect the right of individuals, especially those working in the media, to use hate speech.

Much of the discussion and commentary has been in terms of free speech. I agree with Mark that this is to mistake fundamentally the aim of legislation against hate speech.

Its purpose is to provide redress against harm, harm felt by specific individuals and groups.

It’s not about freedom of speech. It protects speech which is justified on several grounds – including literary and artistic merit (so the argument about Salman Rushdie is entirely specious). It’s about not doing harm through the expression of hateful speech.

If we consider the effects of actually existing racism (or any other form of hate), it doesn’t take too much reflection to see that hurt leads to harm pretty quickly – it’s demonstrable in the impacts of hate speech on identity and thus wellbeing, and there’s a path from wounded identity to self harm, even suicide. (My bold)

Comments on the draft are now being considered by the Government. There’s a whisper that they reconsidering, but the question is still open. You can send Abbott/Brandis a message by signing this petition against hate speech.

In the following section I’ve laid out the nuts and bolts of the proposed changes.

Proposed changes to S18c

Simon Rice explains that the current test for racial vilification is “conduct causing offence, insult, humiliation or intimidation”. Offence, insult and humiliation have been dropped in the proposed changes. Verboten now is an act which is reasonable likely

(i) to vilify another person or a group of persons; or (ii) to intimidate another person or a group of persons.

Intimidate means to cause fear of physical harm:

(i) to a person; or (ii) to the property of a person; or (iii) to the members of a group of persons.

Vilify means to incite hatred against a person or a group of persons.

For an act to be unlawful it must must be “otherwise than in private” and must be done

“because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of that person or that group of persons.”

So the focus is now to be on vilification and intimidation (causing fear of physical harm). It’s OK to cause offence, insult and humiliate.

Vilification and intimidation are permissible if they involve:

words, sounds, images or writing spoken, broadcast, published or otherwise communicated in the course of participating in the public discussion of any political, social, cultural, religious, artistic, academic or scientific matter.”

Reasonableness

“is to be determined by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community, not by the standards of any particular group within the Australian community.”

The actual feelings of the target person or group are irrelevant.

Acts are to be judged independently of their actual effects, rather on what their effects would be if perpetrated on some mythical average member of the dominant group in society.

Discussion

To me, humiliating someone means putting them down, diminishing their esteem in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. To do that on the basis of race, colour or national or ethnic origin is to cause personal and social harm, is racist and frankly appalling. It’s a form of bullying, is tantamount to violence and should be illegal.

Some might argue that to tell the truth can involve offence and insults. Nevertheless I would argue that to offend or insult someone in relation to race, colour or national or ethnic origin means that you regard them as defective or inferior on those grounds. Again harm is done and I have no difficulty in making such acts illegal.

Truth telling appears to have no relevance to Brandis’s notion of free speech. A person can be humiliated, in public, by someone telling a pack of lies, and that’s OK.

Hate speech, racial intimidation and vilification in the public sphere is acceptable in Brandis’s world. To quote Michelle Grattan

In other words, anything goes in the name of free speech, accurate or not.

Vic Alhadeff reminds us that we will never have completely free speech:

“The late Justice Lionel Murphy said: ‘Freedom of speech is what is left over after due weight has been accorded to the laws relating to defamation, blasphemy, copyright, sedition, obscenity, use of insulting words, official secrecy, contempt of court and parliament, incitement and censorship’.”

That’s eleven categories imposing limits on what we are permitted to say in public.

All in all Brandis has cooked a rather nasty brew, emanating I’m afraid from a rather nasty cook. Brandis should remember that the robustness of parliament has resulted in suicide attempts. He seems to want to live in “a world of unrestrained biffo all round”, to borrow a phrase from Grattan.

Penny Wong:

“I think George saying this is about the rights of the bigots really laid bare the philosophy behind these changes.

“For them, it seems to be an abstract philosophical or legal argument. For them it’s a game, it’s a debate about words and abstract principles.

“For people who have experienced racism, it is a deeply personal debate, and it’s actually a debate about real people and real hurt.

“It’s a debate about real people in Australia, what happens on our buses and our trains, in the pubs on the football fields and on our streets. It’s about the message that our parliament sends and what I find missing, apart from the very offensive things in the debate, is empathy and compassion.”

Brandis has struck a blow for bigots, especially one bigoted journalist – Andrew Bolt.

Elsewhere

That was Ben Eltham at New Matilda.

Dennis Altman at The Conversation

Cristy Clark at The Conversation

Climate Action

Climate action 05

June 1, 2014 John Davidson

This week we have high speed transport, the demise of coal, autonomous cars, urban planning and fitting out micro homes

Continue reading Climate action 05 →

Climate Plus

Monthly Archives: June 2014