John Quiggin

Despite Fukushima and the failure of the US “nuclear renaissance”, nuclear power still has plenty of fans in Australia. A question which opponents routinely ask is “where are the nuclear power plants going to go?”.

That’s obviously a difficult question, but there’s a subtly different, and even nastier, question behind it, namely “How should we decide where a nuclear power plant should go”. There are obviously all kinds of issues to be resolved. For example, should it be on the coast, and therefore potentially vulnerable to a tsunami? Should it be near or far from population centres?

If we in Australia made a decision to go for nuclear power, then decided to answer all these questions from scratch, it would take years, maybe a decade or more before we even picked a site (look how long we took over the much easier question of a site for the national capital). And, until we answered the siting question, any estimate of the costs of nuclear power would be a stab in the dark anyway. A plant located in the centre of the Nullarbor would be about as safe as you could get, but hopelessly uneconomic.

So, the obvious answer is; Look at what other developed countries have done when faced with the same problem. But it turns out there is a small difficulty. The answer, according to the US, Britain and every other developed country I’ve looked at, is “put your plant next to an existing one, so there won’t be any more trouble than you already have”.

Of course, it’s logically impossible that they always worked that way. But, as far as I can tell, the last time a new site was picked for a nuclear power plant in a developed country was in the 1970s, before Three Mile Island, let alone Chernobyl and Fukushima. Even supposing that experience were relevant, it’s lost in the mists of time – the decisionmakers involved are long since gone, and any records they left are probably buried in the archives.*

So, unless we can solve a problem that every other developed country in the world has chosen to duck for 30-odd years, we will never even get to the starting gate with nuclear power.

*Update It turns out to be fairly easy to retrieve material from the National Archives, for example, on the proposal, made in the late 60s and abandoned in the early 70s, to build a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay. Thanks to commenter Andrew for picking me up on this.

*Further update Contrary to the claim in the post, a Finnish company has announced a proposed site for a new reactor, though it is not clear that any proper approval process has been undertaken. I doubt that Finnish administrative processes will translate easily to Australia, but it looks like a counterexample to my claim.

Since lots of readers are interested, or, perhaps, a few are very interested, I thought I would mention that the US Department of Energy is beginning an effort to promote the development of modular nuclear reactors in the US. The plan is to choose two designs, with the object of having them in production by 2022. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that one of them will be the Westinghouse SMR, a cut down version of the Westinghouse AP1000 which is the only serious contender remaining as far as conventional reactors are concerned. That leaves one spot for another contender, call it SMRX.

I therefore need to revisit my previous conclusion on SMRs, namely, that none of them except the Westinghouse have any prospect of being in operation before 2020. First, I think it’s pretty clear that the designs that don’t make the DOE cut are finished – in a generally dire funding environment, who is going to back a horse that has already placed third or worse. Second, the DOE 2022 date is an aspirational target that is virtually certain to be missed, at least by SMRX. But, if things go well, 2025 is a possibility. So, by then we might have one conventional design and two SMRs in production on a serious scale.

That’s the title of my latest piece for The National Interest. The first three paras are below.

In the wake of the meltdown last year at the Fukushima nuclear plant, the viability of nuclear power has been called into question yet again. The Japanese government has closed down all but one of the country’s nuclear plants (though there are plans to start reopening them), and Germany has abandoned a previous decision to keep existing nuclear plants operating. Concern about nuclear power has also increased in the United States, with most opinion polls now showing a majority opposed to further expansion of the industry.

On the other hand, some commentators have been struck by the fact that the disaster did not cause any direct loss of life and that estimates of the adverse health effects of the radioactive releases are very modest. A striking example is English writer George Monbiot. An opponent of nuclear power before Fukushima, Monbiot has switched to the view that nuclear power should be supported as a response to climate change.

Unfortunately, this debate has taken place without much attention to the economics of electricity production. The critical question is whether nuclear power can be a cost-effective alternative as compared to renewables, investments in energy efficiency or even such long shots as carbon capture and storage. A look at the economic cost of the Fukushima meltdown suggests that the path to a nuclear future is steeply uphill.

I’m too busy to referee another fight over nuclear power today, so I’m delaying opening comments here until tomorrow. The TNI post is open to comments there, so that will give everyone a chance to get started straight away.

Behind the Seams has been an innovative project blogging the issues around Coal Seam Gas and the Queensland election. I’ve contributed some text, but the real work has been done by Mark Bahnisch, Pandora Karavan and a few others. They’ve incurred some pretty substantial expenses travelling to areas where farmers are dealing with CSG and spending unpaid time. There’s a final chance to contribute to the costs of the project here.

The news that both the Opposition and the Greens are to oppose the reduction in company tax proposed by the government (to be financed by the Minerals Resource Rent Tax) gives the Gillard government a golden political opportunity, if they are competent enough to take it. All they need to do is put the bill up once and, when it is rejected, announce that they will come back again next year. Meanwhile, they can bank the proceeds which will go a long way towards meeting their (ill-advised) commitment to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13. Then, next year they can do a deal with the Greens to make a cut for small business only. That will leave Abbott promising both to reverse the small business cut, and to impose a new levy on big business to pay for his parental leave scheme. This seems to me to work pretty well for both Labor and the Greens, and it gives Abbott the outcome he has chosen, so maybe it’s a win all round.

Meanwhile, and perhaps more significantly, some news on EU cabon prices, which have been the subject of numerous beatups to the effect that a low price will create budget problems for the government. The EU recognises that the low prices means they can make bigger cuts in emissions at low cost. A proposal to do that was vetoed by Poland at a recent ministerial meeting. But a similar proposal is going forward and will be the subject of qualified majority voting in the EU Parliament, probably in June. The most ambitious versions will require emissions cuts of 80-95 per cent by 2050, with milestones along the way.

One of the issues in the debate over CSG and fracking is the timeframe over which the global warming potential of methane (in the form of leakage from both conventional and unconventional natural gas projects) should be assessed. The leading critics of fracking, Robert Howarth and his team at Cornell have used a 20-year time-frame. Since methane has a much shorter residence time in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but has a greater warming potential over that time, the use of a 20-year time frame makes methane seem more serious than if a timeframe of 100 years or longer is used.

The original justification put forward by Howarth for the 20 year timeframe was that this was the likely life of a project. This is nonsensical, and (to me at least) undermines Howarth’s credibility. The world is still warming as a result of coal burned in power stations that closed decades ago, and no one suggests that we should not worry about this.

Howarth has now adopted a new justification that, on the surface at least, is more plausible. Most attention in the debate over climate change has been based on the assumption of a gradual increase in mean global temperatures, equilibrating to a new higher level some decades after concentrations of greenhouse gases have stabilized, with effects that will then play out for centuries. Since stabilization is unlikely to be achieved before 2050, that implies that we should be looking at timeframes of 100 years or even longer.

However, there is also a risk that we will pass some tipping point, after which the entire process will be irreversible. We don’t know much about tipping points, but, as Howarth observes, “”the world runs a high risk of catastrophic climate change in the period of 15 to 35 years from now.””

That’s true, but unfortunately for Howarth and for us, it doesn’t help his case.
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As part of the FAQ “Behind the Seams” series being run by Mark Bahnisch and others, I posted a piece (here at Crikey ) arguing that CSG is less environmentally damaging than coal.

There’s not a lot new to be said about the leak of documents from the Heartland Institute, revealing that the Institute was channeling funds from far-right billionaires and corporations to a large number of self-described sceptics, notably including our own Bob Carter, who’s apparently on a monthly retainer, despite his prior claims of independence. Carter is of course, linked to the IPA, which has a long history of rejecting science for cash, most notably in its decades of work (still continuing) for the tobacco industry.

A few points might be worth restating, though:

* As regards the way in which the documents came into the public domain (still unclear, but Heartland alleges they were tricked into emailing them to the wrong person), Heartland and most of their supporters have shown themselves, unsurprisingly, to be stinking hypocrites. Heartland was among the leaders in publicizing and promoting the use of misleading excerpts from private emails in what they and others called “Climategate”. Now they scream about “stolen” documents, backed up by lots of the usual suspects. There’s an amusing response, with which I agree entirely, from some of the scientists victimised by Heartland and its criminal allies in the past.

* There is no such thing as an honest climate sceptic. Those who reject mainstream science are either conscious frauds or gullible believers. I can confidently predict that of the thousands of “sceptics” who made great play of the CRU email hack, no more than a handful will change their views, either on the substantive issue or on the credibility of people like Carter and institutions like Heartland, over this. Those who aren’t, like Carter, on the payroll are credulous dupes. While many low-information “sceptics” have simply been misled by reading the wrong material on the Internet, or trusting the wrong sources, the great majority of active opponents of climate science are complicit in their own deception, preferring to believe obvious lies because it suits their cultural and political prejudices.

* It may be worth restating the absurdity of the claim that genuine scientists (unlike Carter) are motivated by money. Leaving aside the absurdity of the suggestion that the scientists make their career choice because they were after a highly-paid job, there’s the fact that mainstream climate science has the overwhelming endorsement of scientists in all fields. It’s certainly true that the global warming problem has meant more funding for climate science, but there’s only so much in the budget, and much of this money has come at the expense of other fields which are no longer given priority status.

Blogs have played a significant role in expanding access to public debate on all sorts of issues. But, by the nature of blogging, the contributions have tended to be spasmodic, depending on the time, interest and access to relevant information of individual bloggers. A group of us, kicked off by Mark Bahnisch and others at Larvatus Prodeo, and with hosting from Crikey, have started a project to provide information and a forum for discussion about Coal Seam Gas in the context of the Queensland election, where it’s likely to be a hot issue.

You can get more info, and donate to support the project, here

To try and avoid scatter, I’m not allowing comments on this post. Ideally, wait for the site to go up at Crikey. I’ll foreshadow, though, that I don’t support a position of blanket opposition to CSG, which is likely to be something of a minority view in this context.

As usual with my Fin columns, Catallaxy was straight out of the gate with a response yesterday. It was perhaps unsurprising as my piece mentioned climate change, and the Catallaxy crew includes a self-described “prominent scientist”, Alan Moran, a signatory of public letters attacking mainstream climate science.

In Catallaxy terms, however, Moran seems to be the designated hitter for those occasions when I write about the US political scene. Last time out, he was criticising me for “anointing” Romney as the likely winner – he preferred to discuss the bold tax plans of Herman Cain and Rick Perry. Now, he’s upset that I’ve “anointed” Jon Huntsman as the only Republican contender who seemed likely to beat Obama, ruled out because of his heretical (that is, pro-science) views on climate change.

Anyway, the column is over the fold.

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My piece for the National Interest is now up. It ran under the headline “The end of the nuclear renaissance”, but that’s only half the story and probably the less interesting half. The real news of 2011 was the continued massive drop in the price of solar PV, which renders obsolete any analysis based on data before about 2010. In particular, anyone who thinks nuclear is the most promising candidate to replace fossil fuels really needs to recalibrate their views. There’s a case to be made for nuclear as a backstop option, but it’s not nearly as strong as it was even two years ago.

Feel free to comment here or at NI.

I’m going to relax my prohibition on discussion of nuclear energy, and offer a couple of points to start things off. I expect everything to go in circles as usual, but there’s plenty of room on the comments page, after all.

First, I have a piece coming out soon in the National Interest, arguing that 2011 marked a watershed in the development of energy sources to replace fossil fuels, with nuclear power finally ceasing to be a relevant option, and solar PV finally becoming a serious contender. I’ll add a link when it appears.

I’m sure not everyone will agree, so I’ll also offer a subsidiary claim which, if accepted, would at least simplify the debate. The claim is that the only nuclear technology with a serious chance of substantially reducing CO2 emissions before 2030 is the Westinghouse AP-1000.
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John Howard’s endorsement of Ian Plimer’s children’s version of his absurd anti-science tract Heaven and Earth has at least one good feature. I can now cut the number of prominent Australian conservatives for whom I have any intellectual respect down from two to one. Howard’s acceptance of anti-science nonsense shows that, for all his ability as a politician, he is, in the end, just another tribalist incapable of thinking for himself[1].

Although not all the tribal leaders are old men, an old, high-status man like Howard is certainly emblematic of Australian delusionism . Like a lot of old, high status men, he stopped thinking decades ago, but is even more confident of being right now than when he had to confront his prejudices with reality from time time. Like other delusionists, Howard has no scientific training, shows no sign of understanding statistics and almost certainly hasn’t read any real scientific literature, but nonetheless believes he can rank clowns like Plimer and Monckton ahead of the real scientists.

The situation in the US is similar but even more grimly amusing, with the sole truthteller in the entire Republican party, Jon Huntsman, recently reduced to waffling (in both US and UK/Oz senses of this term) because he briefly looked like having a chance to be the next non-Romney. This tribal mindlessness is reflected in the inability of the Republican Party, at a time when they ought to be unbackable favorites in 2012, to come up with a candidate who can convince the basis s/he is one of them, but who doesn’t rapidly reveal themselves as a fool, a knave or both.

And, as evidence of the utter intellectual shamelessness of delusionism, you can’t beat the campaign against wind power, driven by the kinds of absurd claims of risk that would be mocked, mercilessly and deservedly, if they came from the mainstream environmental movement.

The global left is in pretty bad shape in lots of ways. Still, I would really hate to be a conservative right now.

fn1. I’m not saying that all Australian conservatives are mindless tribalists. There’s a large group, epitomized by Greg Hunt, who understand the issues quite well, but are too gutless to speak up. Then there is a group of postmodern conservatives of whom Andrew Bolt is probably the best example, who have passed the point where concepts of truth or falsehood have any meaning – truth is whatever suits the cause on any given day.

Bismarck is supposed to have said that for the sake of digestion and peace of mind, one should never watch the process by which either sausages or legislation is made. Certainly that’s true of the Draft Basin Plan released by the Murray Darling Basin Authority a few days ago.

What was supposed to be an evidence-based analysis aimed at determining sustainable outcomes was derailed by poor communications and legalistic processes. The botched release of the Guide to the plan last year produced an outpouring of fear and outrage among irrigators who were repeatedly told that their water allocations would be “cut”. The Government rapidly abandoned the process and engaged in the political bargaining that has produced a new plan, of which the most prominent feature is a proposed environmental water allocation of 2750 gigalitres (or perhaps less) well below the 3000 to 4000 GL suggested in the Guide as the minimum necessary for a sustainable outcome.

The process by which this outcome was reached wasn’t pretty and, unsurprisingly, no one is happy about it (I had my dummy-spit a fair while ago). But, considered as a political compromise, the outcome isn’t all that bad. If the 2750 GL total holds, the environmental allocation will be around 25 per cent of the median flow – that’s comparable to what the Snowy got in the deal brokered by Craig Ingram in 2009. It’s a lot better than seemed possible even seven years ago, when politicians could barely agree on measures to return 500 GL, and a suggestion of 1500 was ruled out of court before it was even studied.

Thanks to the Water for the Future program, something like 1700 GL of average flow has already been (re)purchased from irrigators who have been happy to sell. If the government pursues this path, they could declare victory in a few years time and abandon the costly boondoggles involved in subsidising supposedly water-saving engineering projects.

That’s the title of my piece on the passing of the carbon price/tax legislation, in Thursday’s Fin. It’s over the fold

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… but the legislation for a carbon tax/fixed price emissions scheme has finally passed the House of Representatives, and is assured of passage through the Senate. Assuming the government can survive that long, it will come into force at the beginning of 2012-13.

Before any analysis, some (qualified) congratulations are in order. The Greens (with my support at the time, for what that was worth) took a big gamble in rejecting the badly-compromised Rudd-Turnbull deal, and have contributed to the passage of a much better bill now. Still, it turned out to be a long-shot. If the Gillard government had either won an absolute majority or lost to Tony Abbott, there would be no carbom tax. Kevin Rudd laid a lot of the groundwork, but failed to call a double dissolution, which he would surely have won, when the first version of the emissions trading scheme was blocked. Malcolm Turnbull has been a voice of sanity throughout, but still voted the party line. Last but not least, Julia Gillard, having almost succeeded in killing the whole idea in 2010 demonstrated her skills in getting an exceptionally contentious piece of legislation through, despite disastrous polls and the most fragile conceivable majority.

Now, a bit of a look towards the future

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A newspaper story I once read (almost certainly apocryphal) claimed that advertisement to this effect asked for a small payment in return for a guaranteed method of cutting energy bills in half. If you paid up, you received, by return mail, a pair of scissors.

A more serious version of this question occurred to me in relation to yet another dispute about the allegedly special character of energy as a commodity. It occurred to me to ask the following question: suppose that my family and I had to reduce my personal energy consumption, immediately and permanently by 50 per cent. How feasible would it be, and how much worse off would we be? So, assuming we attempted it evenly across the board, this would mean

* Reducing car travel by 50 per cent, until we could get a more fuel-efficient car, or share rides
* Reducing lighting by 50 per cent, until we could get more energy-efficient lightbulbs
* Reducing air travel by 50 per cent, until airlines introduced more fuel-efficient planes
* Reducing use of airconditioning and central heating by 50 per cent, either by turning it off half the time or by adjusting thermostats
* Reducing use of existing consumer durables and purchase of new ones by 50 per cent, until substitutes with less lifecycle energy use became available

To make it a bit tougher, we might try to achieve bigger reductions in these areas, to offset various forms of indirect energy use, such as the energy used in food production.

My assessment is that this would be very difficult. But do some comparisons, and it looks easy.

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In this very silly hit piece in the Oz, Graham Young says that I “imply” that many climate delusionists are (or were) tobacco hacks. His wording in turn implies that they aren’t or might not be. Of course this is a simple question of fact, well documented in Naomi Oreskes Merchants of Doubt. But, as a fun exercise, I thought readers might be interested in a “Six degrees” crowdsourcing exercise for the leading individual and institutional advocates of climate delusion. Candidates score

1. If took tobacco money or public anti-science position on tobacco (denying risks of active or passive smoking)
2. (a) Direct link (co-authorship of, or institutional affiliation for, climate delusionist pieces) to person or institution in group 1, or advocacy of tobacco interests on issues like advertising, plain labelling etc
3. Direct link to group 2

etc.

Bonus points for

(a) anyone who can make a clear case for a climate delusionist with a score of 4 or above
(b) first anti-science commenter to claim “ad hominem”, “guilt by association” etc. Working for, or with criminals like the tobacco lobby, is indeed a guilty association. Those who have inadvertently entangled themselves with links to the tobacco lobby can always repudiate them.

The NSW government has released a a frothing at the mouth press release claiming that a carbon price will devastate the economy. As Mary McCarthy would say, every single word in it is a lie, including “a” and “the”. Top billing has to go to that old favorite of shonky advertisers “up to”, as in a carbon price will ” force up electricity prices for NSW households by up to $498 a year.” The Commonwealth Treasury modelling, which I’ve checked, gives an average cost increase of $3.30 or about $170 a year.

Although the analysis is attributed to NSW Treasury, they apparently weren’t hackish enough for the government, which had to go to Frontier Economics to get the answers they wanted. I’m waiting to see the report, but in the meantime, my reactions to the press statement are over the fold

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We’ve just had the first report from the inquiry into the floods at the beginning of the year in Brisbane and other parts of Queensland. The main recommendations are pretty close to what I put forward a few days after the Brisbane flood.

That just reflects the fact that it was immediately obvious, in hindsight, what changes needed to made. It would have been more impressive to get it right in advance. In this context, I feel some sympathy for the minister at the time, Stephen Robertson. As far as I can see, he was the only person to suggest lowering dam levels, but his requests for a response went nowhere with the bureaucracy. As a result, he got an adverse mention in the report. But if he had stuck to the rulebook, I doubt that anyone would have noticed.

The House of Lords has taken ‘unprecedented’ action to stop Lord Monckton claiming that he is a member (his closest approach was receiving zero votes in an election among hereditary peers). That’s typically the opening lie in a Monckton presentation that misrepresents everything from the United Nations to the laws of arithmetic. It’s hard to imagine how many cease and desist letters would be required to stop all the falsehoods, or what would be left of his presentation if they were removed[1].

But, as I said previously, the real point here relates to the Australian political right, who have embraced Monckton with universal (if sometimes feigned) enthusiasm. And not just Monckton, but a long string of conpsiracy theorists, charlatans and cranks, who keep on repeating the same lies despite being repeatedly refuted (Ian Plimer on volcanoes can stand in for a multitude of examples).

As I said previously, it’s hard to tell who is most blameworthy here. Is it the’crazy uncles’ represented by people like Nick Minchin and encompassing the majority of conservative supporters, who actually believe this stuff, the weathervanes like Tony Abbott who will happily say 2+2 = 4,5 or 73 according to what their listeners want to hear, or supposedly serious conservatives/liberals who know it’s nonsense but keep their mouths shut.

In the short term, and aided by some spectacular own goals on the Labor side, this intellectual catastrophe hasn’t had any political costs for the right. But that won’t be true forever. And for any intelligent person of conservative inclinations, the knowledge that political activity on their preferred side requires (at a minimum) tacit acquiescence in this kind of thing must be pretty appalling.

fn1. Indeed, bearing in mind Mary McCarthy’s famous remark about Lillian Hellman, it’s hard to imagine that even prepositions and conjunctions would remain.

Tim Lambert comments on Greenpeace sabotage of a CSIRO experiment on GM crops. Sadly, Greenpeace has become an openly anti-science organisation.

I agree with everything Tim says, but I’d add something more on the politics of this action. This kind of criminal vandalism, in the “right” cause, appeals to the juvenile instincts that nearly all of us retain to some extent, but it has repeatedly proved disastrous for the left, and the environmental movement. It’s worth comparing this kind of action to civil disobedience protests, where people put themselves on the line and openly invite arrest. If these guys had any desire to promote genuine debate they would turn themselves in and defend their actions in open court.

Given the embrace of anti-science and anti-rational views by the political right, it is important that the left and the environmental movement should dissociate themselves entirely from this kind of action. It will be a long time before Greenpeace can regain my support, if they ever do.

I’ve been a bit slow getting on to this, given the excitement of recent events, but my answer to this question is over the fold

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The proposed carbon tax is a substantial improvement on the heavily compromised emissions trading scheme agreed between the Rudd government and the Opposition under Malcolm Turnbull. Although there is substantial compensation for emissions-intensive industry it is temporary and based on historic emissions level, so that the incentive to reduce emissions is not compromised. The design of the compensation package for households is also welcome.

The government has avoided the temptation to pretend that everyone will be better off, and has taken the reasonable position that high income households do not need to be compensated for the introduction of necessary reforms. This has permitted the very welcome measure of raising the income tax threshold and thereby taking more than a million low-income workers out of the income tax system.

While the primary focus of the package is, correctly, on the imposition of a price on carbon emissions, there are a range of supporting measures designed to encourage energy efficiency and innovation. On the whole, these seem more carefully designed than the measures introduced under previous governments.

Greg Sheridan was upset about my piece in the Fin, attacking his claim that the effects of Australian action on climate change will “will have an impact on the global environment so tiny it will be unmeasurable.” I’ll respond to the details of his objections over the fold, but let’s first tackle the substantive question. Australia is currently responsible for a about 2 per cent of global emissions. Under business as usual projections, our emissions were expected to grow by 20 to 30 per cent between 2000 and 2020. If we achieve the target of 5 per cent below 2000 emission, that implies a reduction of 25 per cent relative to business as usual, 0.5 per cent of global emissions. That’s about 1 per cent of what is needed if the world is to cut total emissions by 50 per cent over the next couple of decades, as is necessary in a stabilisation scenario.

That’s a small step that is not going to solve the problem, but neither is it “so tiny as to be immeasurable”. In fact, it’s pretty typical of Australia’s weight in international affairs – small relative to the big players like the US and China, but large relative to our share of world population. As a comparison, Australia currently has about 1500 troops in Afghanistan, out of a total (ISAF and Afghan army) force of over 150 000. Would Sheridan want to argue that, since our troops are less than 1 per cent of the total, their effects are so immeasurably small that we might as well do nothing[1]. Well, no. It appears that Australia is immeasurably tiny only when we are doing things US Republicans don’t like.

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That’s the title of my column in today’s Fin

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There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy about the prospects of stabilising the global climate, but there are also some promising developments, so I’ve started a series on this topic.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but Stephen Lacey at Grist (via David Spratt on Twitter) has done much of the job for me, and better than I could have. The crucial point is that the cost of solar photovoltaic electricity has fallen dramatically and is almost certain to fall further. In particular reaching the point where it is the cheapest large-scale alternative to carbon-fuelled electricity generation, and competitive (at reasonable carbon prices and in favorable locations) with new coal-fired power.

This makes for some fundamental changes in the debate over climate change and mitigation, even as it reaffirms the central point that advocates of mitigation have made all along, namely that, with an appropriate policy response, the costs of drastic reductions in carbon emissions will be modest in relation to national or global income.

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I wrote a while ago that most of the denialists touting the line that “there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995″ wouldn’t know a t-statistic if it bit them[1]. There’s an even better example in the Letters page of today’s Fin, where JL Goldsworthy of Woorim writes “A carbon tax will save about 0.00001 per cent of anthropogenic emissions, if that”.

We can easily check this estimate. Australia is currently responsible for about 2 per cent of global emissions, and the carbon tax is intended to reduce emissions to 5 per cent below 2000 levels (a target that Tony Abbott also ostensibly supports). Business as usual growth will be at least 25 per cent, so the policy goal is an emissions cut of 30 per cent. Primary school arithmetic tells us that 0.02*0.3 = 0.006 or 0.6 per cent. That is, JL Goldsworthy of Woorim is out by a factor of 60 000.

While this is an extreme case, it’s pretty much routine for the rightwing side of the climate debate. Ludicrous numbers like Goldsworthy’s can be found on just about any rightwing blog you care to visit. I’ve pointed out similarly massive errors by Andrew Bolt, Greg Hunt and Terry McCrann among others.

And they don’t care. The point of the debate is not to get things right but to keep up a steady supply of talking points so that those who have been sucked in by the delusions their opinion leaders spout never catch up with the refutations.

Update Unsurprisingly, this number appears to come from the ludicrous, but dangerous, Alan Jones, already notable for the corruption of Cash for Comment, and for his promotion of race riots, thankfully a rare phenomenon in Australia. It’s hard to say anything good about Jones. But the “respectable” right, exemplified by David Flint and John Howard, embrace and defend him. And not a single self-described “sceptic” has tried to correct this absurd and dishonest claim. If there is a single person on the anti-science side of the debate who cares in the slightest for truth, this is an ideal opportunity to step forward – Bob Carter, Ian Plimer, Don Aitkin and William Kininmonth come to mind as candidates.

fn1. The minority who do know what statistical significance means, and keep circulating this spurious (and now factually false) talking point are even worse. I’ll come back to them in another post.

The Risk and Sustainable Management Group, which I lead at the University of Queensland, launched our Annual Report for 2010 last night (link to large PDF coming soon). I’ll quote from the Foreword

As 2009 drew to a close, it seemed reasonable to expect that 2010 would see a resolution of the Australian political debate over the two environmental issues central to the work of the Risk and Sustainable Management Group: climate change and the management of the Murray–Darling Basin.

In the event, neither of these issues was resolved. The bipartisan agreement in support of an emissions trading scheme collapsed, and the policy was abandoned by the government. Following the August 2010 election, the government restated its support for a carbon price, but the main short-term focus was on the idea of a carbon tax.

Developments in water policy were equally confused. Under the Water Act 2007, passed by the Commonwealth Parliament with bipartisan support, the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) was required to produce a plan for the sustainable management of the Basin. The release of the Basin Plan was delayed by the election. The MDBA produced a Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan in October 2010 which met with a very hostile response, with copies of the Guide being burned at public meetings of irrigators. The Draft Plan is still under development.

I’m feeling a bit more hopeful about carbon prices than when I wrote that. Labor, Greens and the Independents seem to be holding together, and the public debate shows some increasing recognition that Abbott is an opportunistic hack and that while preferring prejudice to science may make for good talkback radio, it is not a good basis for public policy.

By contrast, the situation regarding the Murray Darling Basin has gone from bad to worse to pretty much hopeless. We had everything needed for a plan that made just about everyone better off: more water for the environment, a good deal for farmers who wanted to switch out of irrigation, no compulsory acquisition, and enough spare money sloshing into country towns to more than offset any reduction in agricultural output. Instead, the process was spectacularly mishandled, most notably by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, who managed to scare everyone into thinking the government was about to confiscate their water. That handed power back to the most reactionary irrigator lobby groups who just want to stay on the old, unsustainable, path as long as possible, while extracting as much money as they can from the public purse. The release yesterday of the Windsor Report suggests that they will get their wish. The central point of the report is that the government should abandon all “non-strategic” purchases of water, while pouring even more money into so-called “water-saving” schemes, which will cost 5-10 billion while delivering little if any additional water.

Perhaps there is a way back from this but I can’t see it at present. For the next couple of years, at least, I plan to give up (or at least scale down) my work on the Basin and focus on more tractable problems like stabilising the global climate, saving the Great Barrier Reef and fixing financial markets.

One of the big frustrations with trying to follow the debate on climate change is that most of the key questions are best answered with large, complicated models. Learning enough to assess these models in one subject area, even in general terms, is a huge task, and learning the details of any particular model is a full-time occupation. But, if we are going to make any real progress, we need numbers we can understand. It seems hopeless, but it isn’t entirely so. One thing I learned very early on about modelling is that, for almost any large complicated model, there’s a small simple model that gives much the same answers to the key questions of interest, if you use it correctly, and choose input parameters consistent with those in the big model. The big model (if it’s a good one) imposes consistency conditions you might miss in a simple model, and also gives detailed answers to lots of more specific questions, but a lot of the time, you can do without that. I’m writing a paper at the moment, trying to answer some of the important in a way anyone can check without spending years mastering a big model.

The biggest question of the moment is: what is the right price for carbon? I’m going to look at this question for the world as a whole, disregarding national differences and so on. If you’ve read the title of the post, you’ll know what answer I reach.

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