17 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”

  1. Has anybody heard anything in the mainstream media about the trial of the Pine Gap 4 currently taking place in Alice Springs?

    CHRISTIAN PACIFISTS FACE COURT OVER PINE GAP INSPECTION

    The right to publicly criticise and expose the activities of American spy bases in Australia will come under the spotlight this week when four Christian peace activists face the Northern Territory Supreme Court in Alice Springs after conducting a ‘Citizens Inspection’ of Pine Gap spy base in December last year.

    Jim Dowling, Adele Goldie, Bryan Law and Donna Mulhearn from Christians Against ALL Terrorism, face charges under the Commonwealth Crimes Act and the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act (DSU) 1952. The first stage of the trial commenced last Tuesday.

    Setting a legal and political precedent, Attorney General Phillip Ruddock granted permission for the Commonwealth to invoke the Cold-War era DSU Act in order to throw heavy charges at the activists that carry a maximum of seven years in prison. Retired Federal Court judge, Ron Merkel Q.C. is heading a legal team for the four which will question the Commonwealth’s right to use the Act. The four will be tried together and will plead non-guilty.

  3. They told the Federal Police that they intended to do their ‘citizens’ inspection’.

    They cut through the wire and climbed onto the structures within Pine Gap and then took photos and waited (a few hours) to be arrested. The “Security” even walked right past them.

    They may be christians but they have gumption.

    I haven’t seen any report of this in the media. Has anyone else heard of this case or these mysterious ‘suppression orders’?

  5. My eye was caught by this article in ABC News online about the possible climatic effects of a proposed Tasmanian pulp mill. A bit of Yahooing revealed that Mr Gingis (mentioned as the author of the report) has been involved in promoting cloud seeding, and has apparently had run-ins with CSIRO about it. Nevertheless, the possible impact of particulates on rainfall is, so far as I know, a perfectly respectable theory for which some hard evidence exists – see the IGBP Newsletter No. 52 (p.3 and references) downloadable from here. Those who enjoy a more discursive treatment of particulates could try Hannah Holmes’ delightful book “The Secret Life of Dust�.

    Since mitigation of anthropogenic global warming has as one of its major objectives the avoidance of drought (a highly likely effect of global warming for Australia), I wonder whether those who advocate a carbon tax or carbon trading scheme will now have to also advocate a particulate tax or trading scheme? After all, if the particulates are as dangerous to rainfall as Mr Gingis and others suggest, there doesn’t seem much point in only taxing carbon dioxide and ignoring the dust.

  7. My eye was caught by this article in ABC News online about the possible climatic effects of a proposed Tasmanian pulp mill. A bit of Yahooing revealed that Mr Gingis (mentioned as the author of the report) has been involved in promoting cloud seeding, and has apparently had run-ins with CSIRO about it. Nevertheless, the possible impact of particulates on rainfall is, so far as I know, a perfectly respectable theory for which some hard evidence exists – see the IGBP Newsletter No. 52 (p.3 and references) downloadable from here. Those who enjoy a more discursive treatment of particulates could try Hannah Holmes’ delightful book “The Secret Life of Dust�.

    Since mitigation of anthropogenic global warming has as one of its major objectives the avoidance of drought (a highly likely effect of global warming for Australia), I wonder whether those who advocate a carbon tax or carbon trading scheme will now have to also advocate a particulate tax or trading scheme? After all, if the particulates are as dangerous to rainfall as Mr Gingis and others suggest, there doesn’t seem much point in only taxing carbon dioxide and ignoring the dust.

  8. Nope, haven’t heard anything about this from the MSM, but then these are your common or garden variety Christians breaking the law, rather than blacks, homosexuals, Muslims, etc. Perhaps they’ve trained with AQ in Afghanistan, or they could convert to Islam or something?

  9. Gordon, we already regulate most particulates sources pretty tightly. This has been the core business of urban pollution control since (at the latest) the British Clean Air Act of 1956. Because the sources are diffuse, particulates are not, in general, a good candidate for emissions or trading schemes.

    But SO2, the first big example of successful emissions trading, has effects broadly similar to those of particulates.

  11. There was a small article in “The Age” a couple of weeks ago that discussed the validity of the CPI as a measure of inflation. According to the article, the CPI underestimates the inflation experienced by low income households and overestimates that experienced by high income households. This is because items that make up a heavy proportion of the budget of low income households, such as fruit and vegetables, have increased in price by much more than the CPI. Accordingly I wonder if the financial situation of certain segments of the population have gone backwards, or at the very least not gone forwards, in spite of our current low rate of unemployment and the 16% average real wages growth the Howard and Costello keep telling us about.

    Do you have any thoughts on this, Professor Quiggin?

  12. Here is an interesting post on TMTGM.

    http://themessthatgreenspanmade.blogspot.com/2006/10/not-sustainable.html

    This article raises the interesting question – When everyone is up to their eyeballs in debt, who is going to be doing the spending to keep the economy ticking over?

    Austrian Economists are sometimes labeled “hairshirt” economists, because of their policies in the great depression of the 1930’s. However, I have a feeling that some of their theories may have merit.

  14. Rafe,

    Whilst I have lots of time for Mises and I generally agree with the criticisms that Mises leveled at the role of central banking, I don’t think that central banking alone accounts for the Great Depression. I think that protectionism had a lot to do with it.

    It should also be remembered that the deflation across the British Commonwealth unleashed in 1925 when Churchill appreciated the pound against gold did not depend on central banking. It is a problem that is possible whenever government controls the legal definition of the standard unit of account, which whilst taxation exists is probably always the case.

    I would be more than happy to see central banking abolished, however I can’t stomach many of the other proposed banking reforms advocated by that Austrian Economist Murray Rothbard. In particular his assertion that money put in demand deposit accounts should not be lent out to other people.

    Regards,
    Terje.

  15. Prof. Quiggin, if we are so unexpectedly good at controlling particulates in Australia, I wonder why the Wilderness Society’s submission on the proposed Bell Bay (Gunn’s) pulp mill describes the particulates situation thus (pp. 23-24):

    “Launceston regularly exceeds the 24-hour National Environment Protection Council (NEPC) goal for PM10 particles. Breaches of NEPC’s new air quality standards are running at 7-10 times the maximum rate that will be permitted in 2008, that is 36-47 exceedances per year. In recent years much effort has been placed on minimising air pollution in the valley, with a government emphasis placed on wood heaters and their removal. However, the pulp mill includes the proposal to burn around 300,000 tonnes of wood from native forests every year to generate power for the pulp mill and for sale into the national electricity grid…

    “Gunns’ pulp mill will be a major produce of particulate air pollution in the Tamar Valley. Total suspended particulates (TSP) from the pulp mill will average 271 tonnes per year (Gunns IIS Volume 9 Annex VIII). However, maximum continuous emissions of TSP from the stack will reach a massive 1061 kg (1.06 tonnes) per day. And the short-term maximum emissions from the main stack will reach 73 kg per hour according to Gunns’ IIS�.

    The Dept. of Environment and Heritage provides fact sheets on the effects of various pollutants. The effects of SO2 and particulates are not the same.

  16. Gordon, I think your quote supports my point. It indicates that there is a substantial effort to control particulate emissions through regulation, including the definition of standards (feel free to check, but I’m willing to bet these standards are way below the levels prevailing in major cities in 1950) and the imposition of stringent regulations going down to the household level. According to your quote, permitted deviations are about to be tightened further in 2008.

    The quote indicates that the proposed Gunns mill may lead to violations of the standards. If this is correct, and if existing laws are adhered to, the proposal will have to be modified or abandoned.

    To clarify, I should have written that SO2 and particulates have similar effects on climate change – both tend to cause cooling.

  17. Prof. Quiggin, I will take the second point first. I had intended to say that the effects of particulates and of SO2 might indeed be similar with respect to preventing clouds from forming rain – which is the assertion of Gingis and the researchers who he quotes – but to say that an emissions trading scheme which reduced SO2 would solve the “constipated clouds” problem is not true unless it is in fact SO2 particulates which are causing the problem. Clouds which don’t form raindrops because of non-SO2 particulate pollution would not be “fixed” by SO2 reduction. I failed to express this at all, I’m afraid, but instead referred to general dissimilarities of SO2/particulates. Your response refers to the “global dimming” phenomenon, which wasn’t really what I had in mind.

    The research of a few years ago which seemed to indicate that burning of Amazon rainforest was reducing rainfall there is another instance of what Gingis is referring to. I might be able to find a reference if you (or anybody else) wants one. That would, I think, be an instance where SO2 particulate pollution would be irrelevant – the culprit was, I think, said to be small solid smoke particles.

    I would like to delay my response on the continuing issue of trading/ regulation, but will definitely come back to it.

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