Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Month: July 2006
Guest post on Lomborg
Reader Charles Young has sent me a response to Bjorn Lomborg’s latest outing, pushing yet again the claim of a trade-off between doing something about climate change and increasing aid to poor countries. It’s over the fold.
I’ll just repeat that, as far as I know, Lomborg has never shown any interest in aid to poor countries except as an alternative to Kyoto. The Copenhagen Consensus exercise produced some important and controversial results in the relative ranking of, for example, health and education projects, but I’ve never seen a piece by Lomborg discussing these results and their implications, other than relative to climate change. Feel free to correct me.
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The nuclear option
Over the fold, my piece on nuclear power in today’s Fin – published version was edited a bit.
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Queenslander!
A great win, and a stunning riposte to everyone who was bagging the team and coach after the 1 point loss in the first game. It was a good series, but taken in all, Queensland earned their win well.
Congestion taxes
The issue of congestion taxes has been raised in several SMH articles recently, and the blogs have been all over it.
This is one of many policy ideas in Australia that make obvious sense, but don’t have any big political interest behind them to offset the natural resistance of the political system to anything new.
Public-Private Partnerships get things pretty much the other way around. In most cases the economic case is weak or worse, but there’s a massive and well-financed lobby that stands to gain hundreds of millions from such deals and is happy to share some of the wealth with pro-PPP politicians, who are more or less guaranteed cushy jobs at megapay after they leave poltics.
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
John Quiggin 