Continue reading 9 Out of Ten Australian Households are Considering Solar
The Conversation has run this interesting article suggesting that we could learn a lot from the Scandinavian Countries re Public policy. It is all about comparing countries with a long history of governing to improve the welfare of the people and accepting high taxes with our far less people friendly policies that help minimize the taxes of the rich.
Funny thing is that people like the Yanks have been saying for years that what the Scandinavians are doing will wreck the economy despite the durable success of the Scandinavian countries. The Yanks and clowns like Hockey don’t seem to understand that good health, excellent education, a fairer distribution of income etc. actually help economies stay healthy.
Worth a read and worth discussion.
The OECD has identified Australia as one of a small number of countries in which long working hours are common. In comparison, parents in Sweden and the other main Nordic countries have working weeks shorter than the OECD average. This is in addition to their substantial paid parental leave and publicly provided child care.
Shorter working hours allow parents from Sweden to pick up their children after work without the time pressures Australian parents face.
Australia will probably move to make child-care centre hours more flexible to suit our long working hours. However, the government should encourage shorter working hours, which are more compatible with family life.
The Australia Institute is a progressive think tank that produces credible, fact based economic reports on the issues facing Australia. What I have copied here is a short article from their periodic email on recent decisions by the ANU and others to divest the shares they held of companies whose business and/or behaviour is unacceptable on social, environmental etc. grounds.
It is just part of the pressure being encouraged by organizations such as 350.org to encourage banks, super funds etc. to stop investing in and financing unethical activities such as extracting fossil fuels:
Divestment movement hits a nerve
The fossil fuel divestment movement seemed to hit a particularly sensitive nerve this week. The Australian Financial Review has published a litany of critical front page stories, editorial and opinion pieces. In particular, special outrage flowed over divestment decisions taken by the Australian National University (ANU).
ANU announced last week it would divest from seven resources companies on environmental, social and governance (ESG) grounds. ANU is home to a long running student campaign calling on them to divest from fossil fuels. Under pressure, ANU sought professional ESG research and declared it would knock out the companies that ranked worst. The companies impacted include gas giant Santos, Oil Search and other miners extracting copper, nickel and a range of other minerals.
ANU’s decision has drawn ire, not only from the companies themselves, but also from SA Premier Jay Weatherall, previous Resources and Energy Minister Gary Gray and some Indigenous groups. There have been all manner of complaints: the companies say they weren’t consulted; they have won ESG awards; Santos is a proud Australian “pioneer”; fossil fuels cure poverty “whatever the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on climate”; mining is essential to modern life, and so on. One company is talking about legal action.
Others have baulked at the unusual enthusiasm in the reactions and coverage. A Canberra Times editorial said it “verged on hysterical”. Clean energy commentator Giles Parkinson, himself an ex-AFR deputy editor, said the reaction was “as though someone had committed treason against Team Australia. Or at the very least against Team Coal.”
At first glance, coal has nothing to do with it. ANU is not divesting from coal companies – unlike Stanford, which is divesting from all big coal companies, and Glasgow University which this week said it would divest from fossil fuels. Indeed, without a sector wide screen, ANU is likely to reinvest in fossil fuels. But when ABC’s Lateline covered ANU’s decision this week, theMinerals Council sent the head of their Coal Division into bat for the miners. Maybe that’s because coal is most at risk from the reputational effects of divestment campaigns. Coal is the heaviest emitter, cheapest to substitute with renewables and at most risk of being displaced by new clean energy.
ANU Vice Chancellor Prof. Ian Young defended the ANU’s move:
as “a major researcher in environment and alternative energy, we need to be able to put our hand on our heart when we talk to our students and to our alumni and to our researchers and be able to say that we’re confident that the sort of companies that we’re investing in are consistent with the broad themes that drive this university.”
ANU economist Warrick McKibbIn did not agree, saying “you need proper, clear, transparent policies such as carbon pricing… You don’t get the sort of adjustment we need by these token gestures by institutions like a university.”
But Swiss investment bank UBS endorsed the strategy in a recent investor note. UBS said this was a “potentially effective campaign”, noting that:
“many of those engaged in the debate are the consumers, voters and leaders of the next several decades. In our view, this single fact carries more weight than any other data point on the planet for this issue: time, youthful energy and stamina are on the side of the fossil fuel divestment campaign.”
A key feature of the government’s approach to unemployment is the constant vilifying and harassing of the unemployed. It may be a good strategy for diverting attention from government stuff-ups and appealing to voters darker side but there are no signs that it is reducing real unemployment , creating jobs, preparing people for more productive work or helping to share the available work in a fairer way.
This post asks whether there are smarter, fairer ways of dealing with unemployment. It also presents some useful employment and unemployment welfare system data.
Finland and South Korea are among the world’s leaders in education. So it is worth asking what these countries do that is different. This TED article tries to answer that question by asking what they are doing that is right? What they found was two very different systems. Continue reading What the Top Education Countries do
Newman’s anti solar hysteria and the economic punishing of those who continue to install solar is having little effect on the growth of both rooftop and commercial solar. During August, another 2,794 systems of 5kW or less were added to bring another 11.5MW of capacity into the system. This despite the fact that participating households are being paid little for their power exports.
Continue reading Newman Unable to stop 2794 new Qld Solar in Aug
Climate Spectator had this post on Dick Warburton, the Chair of the RET review committee and his performance on a Fran Kelly interview after his review had been released. It gives a picture of a man who doesn’t understand his own report or anything much else apart from the need to recommend the destruction of the RET and all the jobs it has created. Continue reading Chair of RET Review Not Looking Good
I am fan of of Rob Burgess of Business Spectator. I particularly liked what he had to say about the IS beheading and our reaction to it.
Burgess starts by reminding us how we reacted to 9/11:
Whichever account of Bush’s actions one accepts, history now tells us that the US response to the Al Qaeda threat was exactly what terrorists would want.
Anyone old enough to remember the shock of those attacks will understand why the US was driven to define Al Qaeda as tantamount to a rogue state that could be tackled by a conventional war.
Not lunatics. Not criminals. But warriors who wanted a war … and the West was damned if it wasn’t going to oblige.
It was the wrong choice. We were damned because we did oblige, and the power vacuum in Iraq, and the massing of extremist forces in Syria, are some of the ghastly results.
In our ignorance, Australia also fell into the mistake of demonising Islam as a whole instead of the Islamic extremists who were behind 9/11. In Australia 9/11 was used as an excuse by some to burn at least one mosque, throw stones at least one busload of students going to an Islamic school and rant and rave about hijabs. Then there were the comments from some radio jocks as well as some of our politicians.
There are two dangers here. The first is that we will be so busy trying to avoid “the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq” that we will fail to see the differences between what is happening now and what happened then. (For example IS seems to be the foreign invaders this time around while the Kurds are the natives.)
The second is that we will simply mindlessly repeat the mistakes. In Australia Abbott is already rabbiting on about how this (beheading) could happen in Australia despite al the anti terrorist laws we have in Australia. His comments about “team Australia” aren’t really helping unite Australia and its communities.
Burgess had this to say:
We now seem to be again on the brink of allowing a force of between 10,000 and 17,000 extremists to define a conflict – with themselves as glorious warriors, rather than lunatics and criminals.
The brutal video of the beheading of James Foley is a symbolic missile fired into the heart of the liberal democracies that the IS fanatics so despise.
Their greatest joy is watching the missile explode and rip holes in our democratic political culture, when we could so easily choose to defuse its destructive force.
and
Civilised, democratic debate is the precious core of our society — and that makes it a target for the symbolic missiles sent by groups such as the Islamic State.
To the extent they rouse us to anger, and provoke ill-considered responses, as happened with 9/11, the missile can be said to have ‘exploded’. Let’s not let that happen again.
So what should we do this time round?
ZDnet ran this interesting article on The tech behind Helsinki’s ambitious plan to kill off private vehicles.
Continue reading The Helsinki Plan for Getting Rid of Private Cars
This post brings together a number of items on renewable power including US windpower agreements setting the price as low as $US25 MWh (2.5 cents/kWh. WA thinking of importing Indonesian coal for power generation while ignoring renewables and approval being given by the Pt Augusta council for a solar thermal installation that will be used to desalinate water and heat/cool 20 hectares of greenhouses for tomato growing.
State finances and industries that compete with imports would be a lot healthier now if John Howard had not decided to exclude exports from paying the GST. The Howard justification was based on simplistic claims that the GST export concession would make our exports more competitive. However, the reality is more complex because general export subsidies like the GST concession encourage offsetting increases in the value of the currency. This post argues that we would be better off if the GST export concession was removed? Continue reading Should the GST be Paid on Exports?