111 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  1. Opposition Leader in exhile, Malcolm Turbull, has provided Fairfax Media with his own opinion of the Liberal party’s position on climate change…

  2. Hello John,

    just wondering if you had any interaction with the Queensland Police Special Branch before it was shut down in 1989. I would have thought an active ‘social-democrat’ such as yourself would have been of interest to them. Any curios would be worth mentioning – your file number or anything like that.

    Tin Tin

  6. Terje – no its a reference to Tin Tin at 1.

    Terje – re your previous comment about what women think of Abbott? Well its in the papers according to a “galaxy poll” that women dont mind him. Now I cant find that galaxy poll result anywhere.??? The actual questions women were asked are not given. The results are not shown and furthermore if you want to leave a comment in response to this “claim” at the daily (rag) Tele or some other murdered media production you cant leave a comment (censored Terje – read through – picked through and censored).

    I dont know why I bother to debate you about it Terje. Abbott will never win the next election and my bet is he will be gone before. Even Malcolm Turnbull is in the paper saying Abbotts ETS is complete BS.

    It is and Abbott is.

  7. @TerjeP (say tay-a)

    TerjeP, humans aren’t the only greenhouse gas emitters. All animals are. Hunters should be able to claim credits for their kills. In fact hunting is probably more greenhouse gas friendly than vegetarianism.

  10. @Alice

    Alice, there was something like 15,000 files on the Queensland Police Special Branch records – it didn’t take much for someone to be investigated. Apparently even a terse letter to the editor about government plicy could prompt an investigation.

  11. @Tin Tin

    John, looks like my inquisitiveness has been interpreted as a snark – not the case. Please feel free to delete if you like though.

  12. Michael – I’m thinking about giving them money just for bragging rights. It seems like a good cause irrespective of AGW and at A$6.15 per annum I wouldn’t mind being able to say I’m fully paid up on an ETS alternative. Heck at that price I might even make an advance payment for a decades worth. However I’m still waiting on feedback from the blogosphere so please check it out and offer up your thoughts.

  13. On October 13, 2009 the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) affirmed the “proximity presumption”, which recognises that persons living within a 50-mile (80 kilometre) radius of a proposed new nuclear reactor face a realistic threat of harm if a release of radioactive material were to occur from the facility.
    This decision comes slightly more than 51 years after the first nuclear power plant in the United States was officially opened by President Eisenhower on May 26, 1958 at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. This plant was decommissioned in 1982.
    The case before the NRC involved an appeal by the Calvert Cliffs 3 nuclear project and Unistar Nuclear Operating Services against the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board granting limited standing to joint intervenors – Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Beyond Nuclear, Public Citizen Energy Program and Southern Maryland Citizens’ Alliance for Renewable Energy Solution – in the hearing of an application for a combined licence (COL) for one US Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) to be placed at the existing Calvert Cliffs site in Lusby, Calvert County, Maryland.
    Incidentally, the EPR is one of the “third generation” of nuclear reactors, the first of which is being built in Olkiluoto, Finland.
    When the contract for the 1600MW nuclear power plant in Finland was signed in December 2003, the starting date for operation was planned for 2010 and the overall project cost was €3.2 billion ($US4.5 billion).
    The latest starting date estimate is some time after June 2012 and the estimated overall cost is more than 55 per cent higher at €5 billion ($US7 billion).
    Those seeking to build an EPR in Maryland unsuccessfully asked the NRC to abandon the “proximity presumption” which they claimed was “no longer valid under modern standing jurisprudence”.
    The three Commissioners said they saw no conflict between the basic requirements for standing, as applied in the federal courts, and the NRC proximity presumption.
    They further said that the applicants had not provided any information to refute the basis of the presumption, such as evidence to show that the effects of an accidental release from the planned reactor would be limited to a shorter distance from the facility.
    The logical explanation for the failure to provide such information is that the builders of a “third-generation” nuclear plant could not disprove the presumption that people living within an 80km radius faced a realistic threat of harm if radioactive material were released from their facility.

  15. @Tin Tin
    Im reserving judgement Tin Tin – even though Im not the judge…now why would you ask for the profs file number and why, even if he ever had one, would he give it to an unknown blogger such as yourself?

    I do not doubt Police Special Branch has had investigative powers, not only in QLD, there was some horrific harassements and intimidations and career interferences that occurred in NSW and likely elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s – the so called era of greater civil freedoms and in an era of so called democratic freedom of speech. Sometimes, narrow minded people get carried away with their power and start interfering with the liberties of others….this is the only time Im likely to ever agree with aspects of libertarism – the mindless witch hunting and bogey man chasing and genuine intimadtion of people for their beliefs, done in the name of the police, ASIO or whoever else. These things are a scar that take a long time to heal…just like McCarthyism was a scar that when we look back now…we see “the mindless injustices” carried out in its name. Man’s inhumanity to man. Unable to live and let live.
    Dont worry – I once had a friend who went on holiday to QLD back in the 70s as a teenager and got stopped, interrogated and bullied by the police four times in two weeks (she was pretty as well) – even once returning from the laundromat with a pile of newly washed clothes was made to drop them on the ground and get bags and car searched and then was asked on a date by one. She came back and said “The QLD cops are bastards”. It was well known they were out of control (and then we found out later about the corruption at the core).

  16. Tin Tin said:

    … humans aren’t the only greenhouse gas emitters. All animals are. Hunters should be able to claim credits for their kills. In fact hunting is probably more greenhouse gas friendly than vegetarianism.

    Err no, in practice, probably not. You have to go out with weapons and a car and that seriously adds to the cost. If you go on foot, use a crossbow and hunt feral pigs, cattle or sheep, butcher on the spot and cart it back yourself with a trolley and share it amongst enough people so that it doesn’t require refrigeration or get left to decompose, then maybe so, otherwise …

    Most animals in the wild simply recirculate CO2, and since their overall numbers tend to be stable when they aren’t declining, the cliam sees implausible as a general statement.

  17. @Alice

    Well said Alice. It’s ironic that the era of which you speak in Qld was an era of the great civil liberties movement of students and radical youth in support above all of the democratic right to march which Joh B-P outlawed for yonks. Beattie like most progressive types at the time was part of that social movement and even got arrested I think along with many others at the famous anti-Springbok demo outside the Tower Mill Hotel.

    Of course, our current self-proclaimed libertarians of the economic Right would’ve been no where to be seen in those days in much the same way they’ve been largely silent in the face of even worse encroachments on civil liberties by federal & state Libs and ALP alike in recent years.

    Hypocrites and cowards one and all they are.

  19. Fran

    Your understanding of recycling greenhouse gases is odd.

    Many animals emit methane which is produced, and not consumed. Methane is a greenhouse gas.

    Reducing agricultural livestock and encouraging more vegetable foods would have some benefit.

    Hunting some animals, depending on their methane production, may have a slight positive impact.

    Similarly with CO2, if an increase in animals increases the recycling of CO2 between air, animal, plants, this can still increase the quantity of CO2 in transit through the air.

    This is the problem.

  20. JohnL

    Is this right?

    The latest starting date estimate is some time after June 2012 and the estimated overall cost is more than 55 per cent higher at €5 billion ($US7 billion).

    If this is $A 8 billion then it is $A5 million for just 1 megawatt capital cost.

    Surely, if I put $5million dollars worth of solar cells into a paddock I could get more than a megawatt. [See SOLAR COST ]

    If you are right, and I see no source, this just shows how ridiculous and uneconomic the nuke maniacs are.

  22. After losing his leadership because Abbot and others refuse to follow any kind of party line or maintain unity Turnbull is refusing to follow the party line or maintain unity. Getting quite vocal it seems. A bit of payback or a genuine concern that inaction isn’t a viable option? Not that it couldn’t be both. I did think, after Abbot assured people there would be no action against the 2 senators that crossed the floor, that they’d be read the riot act (with fruity invective) behind closed doors but maybe Abbot can’t afford to, knowing just how close to fracturing the Liberals are. Put his foot down and the floor is likely to crumble beneath him.

    As for nuclear, I’m another one who has been rethinking a pre-existing dislike and thinks it should be on the table. Abbot mentions it as part of a maybe response to an issue he thinks is a socialist conspiracy but I suspect it’s more about the views of the mining industry. I doubt he has any interest in new gen nuclear that can run on existing nuclear waste – that wouldn’t require uranium from Australian mines!

    Globally, nuclear has to be considered vital to emissions reductions and development that doesn’t add to emissions – even if Australia can conceivably get by without it. But our energy sector has no interest in giving up on coal, is almost certainly running on assurances it won’t have to, and are only doing some renewables because they’re heavily subsidised and are being forced to. But they aren’t likely to be that keen on dumping coal in favour of nuclear either. What nuclear does have is a capacity to fit into a grid made for coal fired power.

    Of course I hope we will see significant developments on renewbles in general and energy storage in particular; cheap storage would make renewables a lot more competitive and attractive. Still, renewables with existing technology look a much better long term option than failing to deal with emissions at all.

  23. The main reasons that Australia will not get a nuclear power plant in the foreseeable future is that it will simply be too costly. Maybe after the Chinese build a few hundred pebble bed reactors and the technology becomes cheap enough they can build one in Australia. The idea that Australia could ever hope to develop anything of this sophistication is almost touchingly naive. We also don’t have the kind of bureuacracy or private enterprise that could manage anything of this scale. This isn’t France.

  24. @TerjeP (say tay-a)
    I might be interested in a program to reduce unwanted pregnancies in Australia. A start could be made in scrapping the baby bonus in favour of more direct means-tested support for lower inome families who really need the money. Restricting the availability of alcohol might help with unwanted pregnancies too. Reducing births in Australia would also provide bigger reductions in greenhouse gas emissions due to our high energy lifestyles powered by fossil fuels.

  26. Abbott should not be surprised, this is how he treats people himself. Did he never imagine his victims would not turn on him one day, to give him a dose back of his own medicine?
    On a different note, its hard to thinkof people who more represent the philosophies in conflict: the true freemarket liberal rational pragmatist in Turnbull, who is a consequentialist, and the deadly deontological Abbott straight out Burke and Hobbes (and DeMaistre?); post and pre enlightenment thinking in deadly conflict.

  27. John Humphrey gives the Guardian a fisking for it’s alarmism on climate change:-

    http://blog.libertarian.org.au/2009/12/07/fisking-the-guardian-on-climate-change/#comment-79414

    An extract:-

    There is good science to suggest that humans are contributing to a warming planet, but there is very little evidence to suggest that our prosperity or security will be “ravaged”. There have been only 14 peer-reviewed studies of the consequences of warming, and they mostly find an impact of -1 or -2% of world GDP in about 100 years time. Of course, the world grows by about the same amount every year. So the “ravaging” is actually just the equivalent of a one-year recession. How under-whelming.

    Even the Stern Review and the Garnaut Review (not peer reviewed, and significant outliers compared to the peer-review literature) confirm that humanity will be more prosperous in the future, even with no climate policy.

  30. JohnL

    Interesting story. However it needs careful reading as most of the cost escalation appears to have been due to contracted penalties and was not necessarily inherent in the technology.

    However the problems with welds and concrete, plus requirements for State subsidies, can show how thinks can proceed along a nuclear path.

  31. TerjeP, the assertion that, with no climate policy (2 to 4 degrees C of warming over this century seems probable) the result will still be a more prosperous world, I think is overly optimistic. Very over the top optimistic. Not to mention that by 2100 the consequences, far from levelling off, will be accelerating, warming will almost certainly be bringing on the release of ever more CO2 and methane from permafrost and clathrates, ecosystem damage will be severe, Australian agriculture decimated, lots of low lying and previously productive agricultural land will be inundated… I seriously doubt that Garnaut or Stern would agree with Humphrey’s interpretation that a century from now the impacts, without any action, will be “just the equivalent of a one-year recession”.

    Of course, from someone like Humphrey who clearly doesn’t accept that there is a problem, that still resorts to basic misunderstandings of short term variability and longer term trends to make a misleading point, who thinks the worst has been ‘some ice melting’ – nothing to worry about – this interpretation is no surprise. But I had thought you’d got past your presumption that nothing serious is happening to our climate and that the scientific case for AGW was too weak to justify any serious action.

  32. TerjeP

    Ye Bloody God’s, I clicked on your link to the rightwing anarchist site and I found this quote:

    That has lead to some ice melting, but there is nothing particularly scary about that.

    Melting ice caps is by far the most scary of all warming trends. It forshadows a real environmental emergency, but it takes a bit of thinking to see the real possible impacts.

    So listen anarchist…

    The latest peer reviewed article I can find is “Science” 13 November 2009: 984-986.

    It notes the melt rate from Greenland is 273 gigatons of ice a year. (Gigaton = 1 cubic kilometre).

    Ice sheets and glaciers elsewhere in the world are also melting.

    FACT

    But the real problem emerges when you realise that when ice turns into water, it absorbs 333 joules of ‘latent heat of fusion’ (about .1 kilowatt per litre).

    If this ice was not there this heat, instead of melting ice, would heat the environment.

    So if we have a slight warming tendency now, when the ice is gone, the same heat will be trapped by the greenhouse effect, and the conclusion is inevitable.

    Today’s melting ice is a convenient heat sink, that is canceling the greenhouse effect, temporarily.

    You can google latent heat of fusion for the data.

    If we consider that the global ice melt is around 365 gigatons per year, then at 1 gigaton per day this equates to 10^8 kilowatts per day, (I have my workings but they are a bit tedious to include here – anyway just arithmetic)

    Once this is redirected to heating the environment – we cook.

    So by all means dream on – there is nothing scary – but at least

    1) get the facts
    2) get the data
    3) do the work
    4) show some proper analysis.

  33. I just did a little more searching, and here is data on southern ice melt.

    Antarctic ice melt is 196 gigatons per year (2006)

    http://tinyurl.com/icemelting

    There is no alternative, the polar caps control the world’s climate.

    With luck, the Antarctic ice melt my have been impact of the ozone hole, which has since been addressed. But economic growth caused the ozone hole to start with.

  34. @Ken
    “TerjeP, the assertion that, with no climate policy (2 to 4 degrees C of warming over this century seems probable) the result will still be a more prosperous world, I think is overly optimistic. Very over the top optimistic.”

    Tell it to Stern and Garnaut, the ones who said it.

    I’m no denialist, and I’ve repeatedly disagreed with John Humphreys over the estimates of damage that climate change will cause (he, like most of his ilk, thinks sea level rises are the main concern, and therefore there’s not much to worry about), but the counter-argument of sceptics and denialists that we are going to be richer and better able to deal with climate change in the future is a reasonable one that can’t be easily dismissed.

    Personally, I think the costs of inaction will be greater than JohnH supposes, and that the costs of mitigation-later will be much greater than mitigation-now, but that doesn’t make the claim of mitigation-later-is-better automatically bunk.

  35. @Chris Warren
    “But economic growth caused the ozone hole to start with.”

    That’s a weird statement. Obviously it was specific pollutants that caused it. Since they were indirectly produced by scientific and technological improvements, I guess you could say that they were indirectly, indirectly produced by economic growth. But why stop there? You could also say the ozone hole was indirectly, indirectly, indirectly caused by humans. Or the combination of planetary phenomena that made humans possible.

    Heck, go the whole hog and use my Reason For Everything – causality and the boundary conditions of space-time. Or use someone else’s – God. That’s right, the ozone hole was caused by either the Big Bang or Allah. 😉

  36. Jarrah, I can’t see that being short term richer based on greater spread and reliance on emissions intensive technologies will result in lowered emissions on any kind of time scale that will avoid seriously damaging climate impacts; that kind of development locks in ever greater emissions for decades. It’s not real wealth if it leaves long term external costs out of the equation; more like living it up on credit with no capability or intention of repaying. If that development is truly in the western wasteful consumer economy style it definitely looks like a way to make things worse.

    Unfortunately there’ll be no defaulting or writing off those costs. So I don’t have much problem believing mitigation-later-is-better is bunk. Especially given the scale of development requirements around the world. Doing it cheap and dirty doesn’t look like facing this problem face on at all, more like pretending it’s not a problem at all.

    Chris, it looks like the rate of ice-sheet melt has accelerated so much recently that it’s about 4 times as rapid now as a decade ago; it does look like a crucial tipping point is being passed. That climate denialists, including Humphrey, see the recent decade as a plateau for warming and fail to even reference such data – and that so many people seem to accept similar claims of warming having stopped as true – doesn’t give me cause for optimism.

  37. Michael :
    The main reasons that Australia will not get a nuclear power plant in the foreseeable future is that it will simply be too costly. Maybe after the Chinese build a few hundred pebble bed reactors and the technology becomes cheap enough they can build one in Australia. The idea that Australia could ever hope to develop anything of this sophistication is almost touchingly naive. We also don’t have the kind of bureuacracy or private enterprise that could manage anything of this scale. This isn’t France.

    A large part of the cost is a product of compliance with the regulatory environment. That means it is double counting to put that down in addition to counting the reasons for regulation; if nuclear reactors were desirable on other grounds, that would also imply not having the sort of bureaucracy you envision but a simpler one – if, and if not, don’t do it at all. There are already proven nuclear reactor technologies that are cheap enough to buy in, support, and regulate, and that are ready to go, like CANDU reactors. That sort of approach would not involve new development and the skills needed to support it straight away, but rather it would grow the skills base needed for any future rounds (for that, at present I incline towards fast molten chloride reactors that would breed fuel from a thorium based jacket with the help of beryllium neutron multiplication to beat break even).

  38. @Chris Warren
    LOL -“So listen anarchist…”
    …I shouldnt laugh but I cant help it (and wish I said it)! I love what pops up in here occasionally. You guys are funny!

  39. @TerjeP (say tay-a)
    Terje – Im with you that the bloody baby bonus is bad policy. So is the back to school allowance. I had a single mum friend that bemoaned these two. She said they handed it to rich women who could shove that cheque in their purse and forget about banking it for months because they didnt need it ….whereas those in real need – it would have been a real help.

  40. @Alice
    That was the genius of Howard’s non-means tested handouts. Even though most people probably knew they didn’t really need it, you get used to it real quick and then feel deprived when it’s taken away. Australians love the tax-deductions-welfare merry-go-round. Much more fun than actually making things or tackling drudgery like climate change.

  41. Ken and others

    I have posted two links to data on ice melting.

    I have found it hard to find useful data as most reports are descriptive and focus on the area being lost (which cannot be used for quantity calculations as thickness varies).

    So I would like to hear of any other data sources of ice melt by a defined period for glaciers and other ice sheets.

    Glacial contraction of some “metres per year” is not useful data.

    Anyone know of any uptodate source?

  42. Terje, IPCC AR4 WG2 TS says

    These
    observations confirm evidence reported in the Third
    Assessment that, while developing countries are expected to
    experience larger percentage losses, global mean losses could
    be 1-5% of GDP for 4°C of warming [F20.3].

    And, of course, 4 degrees is not the maximum projected, so even larger costs are possible. Humphreys would seem to be wrong again.

  43. PM Lawrence

    I wish you would read your own link.

    Under the section titled “Economics” it presents no cost information at all, but towards the end cites a Canadian plant costing $14.4billion for 3.5 Gwatt.

    Is this what you want to inflict on Australians (presume Aust 2009 equiv is over $20 billion).

    You also did not mention the fact that the waste from this plant is not being held in underground storage.

    You also haven’t addressed all the other issues covered previously.

    You proposal looks unaffordable, polluting, and very risky.

  44. I have no argument with the idea that melting ice acts as a massive heat sink. So if the world is warming I hope ice is melting otherwise things would get uncomfortable.

    Tim – I don’t see anything in your quote that contradicts what John Humphrey wrote. Perhaps you could help out by quoting the specific phrase or paragraph that he said that disagrees with the IPCC quote that you have offered.

  45. p.s. If you really think he is wrong you might like to cross post the details directly on the ALS article itself so that incoming eyeballs can see the error. The ALS blog gets between 500-1000 viewers a day.

  46. Terje, Humphreys says the cost will be only 1-2% in a hundred years time. The IPCC says 1-5% for 4 degrees of warming and that warming will be 1.1-6.4 degrees.

    Humphreys deletes dissenting comments so I will not comment at ALS.

  47. @TerjeP
    says ” So if the world is warming I hope ice is melting otherwise things would get uncomfortable. ”

    Sorry Terje – but you need to be called on a statement as ludicrous and insane as this one.

  48. Chris Warren at 30: On the estimated costs of nuclear power plants, perhaps you will find interesting this quote from John Rowe, Chief Executive Officer, Exelon Corporation, at the Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference: Part 1: Toward a Nuclear Power Renaissance? Fact or Fiction in Washington on April 6 2009.
    You will find this at http://www.carnegieendowment.org/events/?fa=eventDetail&id=1303
    Rowe said: “The problem is, of course, first, a new nuclear project is vastly expensive. We estimate two 1500 megawatt units to cost in the order of $12 billion in today’s numbers. I represent the biggest company in my industry and that’s bigger than my balance sheet. So we can’t do it without the federal subsidy.”
    He went on to say: “The second problem is, of course, the waste issue. We’ve spent 20 years and $9 billion on Yucca Mountain, which is for all practical purposes dead or dormant. We have a great deal to do – to find an alternative methodology of storing the spent fuel, which may be a million-year problem, but the volumes are a lot smaller than they are for a lot of other million-year problems. Or we have to reprocess, but reprocessing brings about the proliferation risk, which the next speaker is more competent to talk about than I am. And reprocessing, at least in the current forms, also creates more low-level waste.”
    To be fair, Rowe did go on to say he could not picture dealing with climate at the present time that would keep America competitive without nuclear energy being a big part of it. He wished there were an easy option. He did not like to build things that created million-year problems. He did not like to build things that required all the financial risk and all the politics that a nuclear plant required. But he could not see America succeeding and meeting its obligations without it.
    Rowe’s comment on the high cost of nuclear energy follows a similar comment in 2007 by George Vanderheyden, the president of UniStar Nuclear (a Constellation/Areva, Bechtel venture), that “a nuclear plant can be financed in the United States only if the government provides a sufficient level of loan guarantees to allow utilities to ‘shed the risk’ of the first few units.”
    The source for this is the 24 May 2007 issue of Nucleonics Week under the heading “Nuclear ‘renaissance’ could falter if costs rise, Icapp meeting told”.
    Icapp is the International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants.
    Vanderheyden repeated this sentiment outside a meeting in Calvert County, Maryland, where Constellation Energy has proposed a $4.5 billion new reactor project, according to an article in the September 5, 2007 edition of the Washington Post.

  49. “The ALS blog gets between 500-1000 viewers a day.”

    That’s internationally, right? Impressive!

  50. Chris Warren :
    PM Lawrence
    I wish you would read your own link.
    Under the section titled “Economics” it presents no cost information at all, but towards the end cites a Canadian plant costing $14.4billion for 3.5 Gwatt.
    Is this what you want to inflict on Australians (presume Aust 2009 equiv is over $20 billion).
    You also did not mention the fact that the waste from this plant is not being held in underground storage.
    You also haven’t addressed all the other issues covered previously.
    You proposal looks unaffordable, polluting, and very risky.

    I did read that link – and I have tracked many others that go into this area in much greater depth, and which give far more information on the economics of it all.

    That price incorporates their regulatory costs, of course, so my earlier point about how best to price these things still applies. If you like, you can look up the pricing India uses for this sort of reactor.

    Likewise, I didn’t go into storage or other issues, because I only wanted to point people at the topic – to open up the issue, not to swamp people with minutiae at a far too early stage. But they are no big deal if you plan on moving on to later generation reactors, as then you only have to store products until the later reactors can consume them. (If not, there’s little point having the interim transition approach anyway – unless yet other things justify it, which would in turn fold in long term storage as part of their cost benefit analysis.)

    So you have no basis for concluding that the “proposal looks unaffordable, polluting, and very risky”, for the good and sufficient reason that all you have had to go on was the briefest introduction to the area. Bluntly, all you were told was that the first step was a known step that hadn’t hit overwhelming problems when tried elsewhere, which is evidence the other way.

    Would you like some other links, or would you rather go and check for yourself to be sure of not being biassed?

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