Environment

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Climate change and the Murray Darling Basin

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate on the future of the planet for the last week or so, what with the nationalisation of vast segments of the financial sector, the disappearance of all four remaining US investment banks, the trillion dollar bailout and so on. But I’m going to be presenting a lecture for [...]

Brown coal

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

I’m planning a full-length post on Garnaut, but I thought I’d do a quick check on what would be involved in meeting the target of a 10 per cent reduction in emissions between 2000 and 2020. My guess is that the increase in oil prices we’ve already seen will be enough to bring consumption of [...]

Methane

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

I spent most of yesterday at a symposium organised by the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology. A lot of topics were discussed, but one that interested me was methane, mainly that emitted from both ends of ruminants such as cows.
There’s plenty to to say about this, but I’m just going to repeat one [...]

Blogging about water

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

I haven’t really overcome my backlog, but I am going to appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday and Saturday this week, talking about blogging and water, so it seemed like a good idea to run a blog post about water.
My piece in the Fin a couple of weeks ago appeared simultaneously with the [...]

How to get an ETS through the Senate

Friday, July 25th, 2008

After the contortions of the last few weeks, I think it’s pretty safe to draw the following conclusions
(i) The Liberal Party is all over the shop on climate change and is going to stay that way, at least as long as Brendan Nelson remains leader
(ii) Whatever legislative proposal the government comes up with, the Opposition [...]

The litterbug argument

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Over the fold my piece from yesterday’s Fin, a response to the argument that since Australia only contributes about 2 per cent of global CO2 emissions, there’s no real point in us doing anything. I’ve drawn on discussions here, so thanks to everyone who participated.
Although the article includes some allusions to the Green Paper, the [...]

Meetings, bloody meetings

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

There have been quite a few important meetings lately including COAG, G8 and the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change (MEM) in Japan, attended by Kevin Rudd. Anyone expecting substantial progress to come out of these particular meetings was surely disappointed. But to look on the bright side, if any of these [...]

What I’ve been reading

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Climate Code Red by David Spratt and Philip Sutton (more details here). This is a book that will doubtless be welcomed by those with a sceptical attitude towards the mainstream discussion represented by the IPCC, and makes many points that will be familiar from debates here - there’s more uncertainty in the IPCC models than [...]

Carbon taxes vs emissions trading

Monday, July 7th, 2008

Now that nearly everyone is agreed on the need for a market-based policy instrument to reduce CO2 emissions, the biggest unresolved question is whether to implement carbon taxes, tradeable emissions permits or some hybrid of the two.
I support tradeable permits, but I’ve never really spelt out my reasons for doing so. It’s important before doing [...]

Garnaut draft report released

Friday, July 4th, 2008

The Garnaut Review draft report has just come out. The site is clogged, but I’ve managed to get a copy of the report and press release (I’ve attached the latter here.
There’s a lot of discussion of the Murray Darling Basin where the worst-case projections are about as grim as they can possibly be. My UQ [...]

Radical scepticism

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

For a long time, I’ve used the term “delusionist” rather than “sceptic” to describe those who reject mainstream science on global warming. In general, the term “sceptic” is inappropriate for the vast majority of this group, since their position is hardly ever based on a willingness to look sceptically at evidence without reliance on a [...]

The nuclear option

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Unsurprisingly, evidence that the Rudd government is serious about emissions trading has produced a new round of calls for the development of nuclear power in Australia. There is certainly a case to be made that an expansion of nuclear power should be part of the global response to climate change. But the latest chatter [...]

Bad news on the Murray

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Grim if unsurprising news from this Leaked report on the state of the Murray-Darling river system. The failure of the autumn rains (again) has wiped out the modest benefits from the (already fading) La Nina event. The problem has been generated by a long history of bad policy, but, at this point, even the best [...]

Libertarians and global warming

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

I had a set-to with Jonathan Adler of Volokh about DDT recently, so I was pleased to note this piece on free-market environmentalism and climate change, which makes a number of points I’d been thinking about following debates over at the Australian Libertarian blog. Rather than recapitulate Adler’s post, I’ll make a number of [...]

Defending Rachel Carson: the last word

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

The Prospect article defending Rachel Carson I wrote with Tim Lambert kicked off a lengthy round of blast and counterblast in the blogosphere. Some of the response did little more than illustrate the continuing gullibility of the RWDB segment of the blogosphere, notably including Andrew Bolt and Glenn Reynolds (start here). The more serious discussion [...]

Coral Reef Futures

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

A talk I gave at the Canberra Coral Reef Futures Forum, is online here with a number of other interesting (if often depressing) presentations. I tried putting it up on YouTube (over the fold) but the picture quality was greatly reduced by file conversion.

The Great Library of Tlön

Friday, June 6th, 2008

Via Tim Lambert and Matt Nisbet a study in the journal Environmental Politics (here, but unfortunately paywalled) shows that at least 90 per cent of the books that have been published disputing mainstream environmental science have been produced by rightwing thinktanks or authors affiliated with such thinktanks. Symmetrically, at least 90 per cent of the [...]

Videoconference at LaTrobe

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

I’ll be appearing (on the big screen) at LaTrobe University tomorrow Friday 12-1 talking on the topic “Discounting and Intergenerational equity: the case of climate change”. Contact the School of Business for details.
I’m going to check if I can get a recording to post on YouTube. I’m also looking into streaming video, but that’s some [...]

Videoconference: the upload

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

I’m putting up part 1 of the talk I gave in Adelaide last week, on prerecorded DVD. I’ve posted it on YouTube for the moment.

I tried posting directly within Wordpress, but that didn’t work well and I thought that even if I used FTP to put the file up, the effect on server load would [...]

Bate and tobacco

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

In discussing Roger Bate’s response to my article with Tim Lambert in Prospect defending Rachel Carson against the slurs of the DDT lobby, I thought it would be best to leave aside the question of Bate’s links to the tobacco lobby (already discussed in comments to an earlier post) and focus on Bate’s substantive concessions [...]

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