51 thoughts on “More sand”

  1. Alan

    This is a war between the neo-capitalists and the eco-fascist Greens, it has nothing to do with me or you. Let’s just look at weather and climate, free of politics.

    Jackerman will disagree with this approach and that’s because she doesn’t understand the science.

  2. Much more of Tony G’s bad-mouthings of honest scientists and I’ll be petitioning for a dedicated playpen for him. Somewhere special – maybe named for him – where he can bounce around throwing muck to his heart’s content. Tim Lambert at Deltoid has shown that the idea can work, for serial pests and those (sometimes including me) who might like to play with them.

    Tony: those who unrepentantly hurl charges of “fraud” and “lies” at people they don’t know, people who’ve been found innocent, invite only the harshest judgments of their own character. (I expanded on this sentiment a few days ago – with biblical references Tony! – here https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2010/09/25/sandpit-259/comment-page-2/#comment-268325 )

  3. @frankis
    Frankis – once upon a time in Australia they spread sawdust on the floor in pubs to catch the drips. How about the honourably named “Tony G sawdust pit”?

  5. @frankis
    Tony G would enjoy it. I know he likes hanging out in the pub with the blokes so he can tell us what they said about climate science in his unique brand of circular arguments

    Tony G – if you are listening we already know you are loopy ha ha.

  6. el gordo

    I am happy to look at ‘just the science’. That will be an entirely new approach for you. Perhaps as part of your lightening on the road to Damascus you could give up quote mining as well.

  7. @el gordo

    and the eco-fascist Greens

    This description alone attests to your copy and paste idiocy. How can a person who deploys such a phrase participate in any serious conversation?

    The fascists were organised gangs of expressly genocidal/democidal people who ultimately brutalised and killed people in a systematic industrial scale fashion, trialling gassing on the intellectually disabled as a start. Real people suffered at their hands and when the death camps were liberated every civilised human being blanched at what was found.

    That you would invoke this period of barbarism to make a rhetorical point against those who stand against your wish to push humanity towards a new barbarism, is not merely ludicrous and ignorant but grossly offensive to those who survived it.

    If you had a shred of personal integrity you’d withdraw the characterisation unconditionally and criticise others in your clan who raise it.

    I won’t hold my breath anticipating that however. As always, for the filth merchant spruikers and delusional cranks who live in the world of take what you want at the top of their own Magic Faraway Tree no lie is too much and every slander worth repeating.

    One cannot stand for filth without being filthy, plainly.

  8. Early in the tobacco wars the companies decided that they couldn’t just advocate for their profits, they had to argue for something idealistic. Their solution was to centre their campaign on freedom of speech and characterise action against tobacco as a threat to democracy. I know it now sounds ridiculous but they did block action against smoking for a generation. Now that we have the climate wars, companies opposed to action on climate change have the same problem and the same answer. The ‘neo-fascist Green’ slur is pure spin designed to make uninformed people feel there is a real threat of Greens lurking under their bed. Corporate-backed astroturf campaigns are like that.

  9. Fran

    ‘Ecofascist – The term is also used as a political epithet by political conservatives to discredit deep ecology, mainstream environmentalism, and other left and non-left ecological positions, and by political leftists to discredit environmental movements they see as non-left such as deep ecology.’

    That’s me, a political leftist, and what the Greens are doing is unacceptable. We should never have aligned with them in the first place.

  10. @el gordo

    That’s me, a political leftist, and what the Greens are doing is unacceptable

    Nonsense. No “political leftist” would use the term fascist as you have here, precisely for the reasons I outlined above. Neither would any “political leftist” align him or herself with those opposing human wellbeing as you have done.

    That you have doesn’t make you a fascist. It just makes you a reckless, unscrupulous liar or incorrigible idiot and enemy of humanity, like all reactionaries.

  11. The Greens are about the only decent people in politics right now el gordo – welcome to the team. However you will need to give up your climate science sceptic postings first.

  13. @el gordo
    But I thought you said you were a political leftist el gordo? We have your seat here nice and warm for when you give up the delusionbism and fight the good fight.

  15. The el gordo seems to have sand in his brain.

    But its fun to have a beach ball to kick around though.

  16. There is nothing inherently Left Wing about being a Greenie. Indeed, the very nature of Convservation would lead one to conclude that political conservatism is more in line with being a conservationist.

    The conflict between “green” & “leftist” is possibly greater than the conflict between “green” & “animal liberationist”. The Two ideologies aren’t compatible.

    Whenever greens have to decide which they are, which ideology is going to triumph?

    To date it has been leftism that has triumphed over being green (whenever it has come down to having to make that choice)

    Conserving the natural environment is the very antithesis of being politically progressive.

  17. Interesting comments Steve, tensions and attactions are complex.

    I hope Green can become a bipartisan integral of competing ideologies.

  18. It is true that you’d expect conservatives to be conservationists, but it’s hard to think of any examples of the contemporary right embracing the environment. Perhaps Tony Abbot embraces a kinder gentler ecology the way he embraces a kinder gentler polity or the US Republicans were actually chanting ‘Conserve, baby, conserve’ and we all misheard. Steve at the Pub’s comment would be more persuasive if he could give some actual examples.

  19. @Steve at the Pub

    There is nothing inherently Left Wing about being a Greenie.

    How utterly perverse! SATP said something accurate.

    Indeed, the very nature of Convservation would lead one to conclude that political conservatism is more in line with being a conservationist.

    Gosh, 50% correct. Conservatives should, in theory favour conservation. Still not bad.

    Of course, the curve was all downhill from there. Being “leftwing” isn’t an “ideology” and nor is being “green” except in a rather superficial sense because being left or green can mean a variety of things. Some of them are very similar and some aren’t.

    Most greens and most leftists draw on similar ethical paradigms: humanism, equity, justice and share a kind of aesthetic that values the interpersonal over the mechanistic, and values life and its dioversity over the banalities of urban life.

    Here I suspect is why one doesn’t see many conservative Greens. Their desire to preserve things as they are forces them to choose between preserving elite power and the value of elite assets on the one hand and preserving the biosphere which is the target of elite interest on the other. Their natural cultural and political allies are the wealthy (many and perhaps most of whom are non-conservative rightwingers) and so the conservatives defer when ever there is a conflict to their non-conservative allies.

  20. It may surprise a few people here, but when I went through undergraduate studies I met quite a few people who were Liberals by birth – Dad is a Liberal so I will be too – yet they clear understood the issues of conservation and why it is essential. I doubt that I would ever meet such a group again should I return to a university today. If someone claims that they think AGW is quite real and observable, I know almost immediately that they are not of the Liberal/National coalition. If they say it is shite, then they are almost certainly a Liberal voter or a National voter, and may even be from a rural background.

    This is an unfair generalisation if applied to individuals, but nevertheless it seems to be the situation today. The very fact that AGW has become a signal item for membership or not (political voting intentions being non-Liberal/National or Liberal/National) indicates to me that the climate wars originated in the political hemisphere of life rather than in the scientific, curiousity-driven search for truth hemisphere of life. The scientists were in many ways belated and reluctant participants. Except for those few with a political axe to grind – oddly enough many of them are meteorologists by training, or geologists – who got onto the gravytrain very early in the piece. Most of these people seem to be associated or actively employed by right-wing thinktanks of the neo-theo-conservative type. It seems weird to me that such a fractious affray has happened in the case of AGW, in a way that has no real connection to the science itself. The leader of the opposition has stated on the record that he believes that climate science is crap; this is amazing precisely because he not only has no scientific training of the level to make that call, but the vast majority opinion among climate scientists of internation standing is that AGW is real and observable right now – messy and difficult science yes, but crap? No way. Therefore, Tony Abbott failed to take the best advice available about the state of the world in relation to humanity’s interaction with it.

    Even if he personally thinks it is crap Tony Abbott should still be listening to the advice of the most valuable scientific institutions in the land, and to their scientists. They’ve been to Antartica, Canada, the Arctic Circle, the permafrosts in the old Russion Empire – has Tony? No, he hasn’t. So what evaluative criteria could he possibly have used to conclude that the AGW theory – and climate science, on another occasion – is crap? What could possibly warrant such a claim by the almost prime minister of Australia?

  21. If you are prepared to look back a generation or so there actually conservatives who had not detached from reality and who acted on environmental issues. Malcolm Fraser’s action on whale protection is an example. Margaret Thatcher’s warnings on the dangers of global warming are another. Even then however, Ronald Reagan’s theory that trees cause acid rain was more typical and has now become universal among the right. Reaganism triumphed as an ideology, if not as a way of actually doing anything, and killed off any rightwing flirting with the environment.

    That is why the right continually tries to make environmental issues subsidiary to their obsession with the market and to force any facts that undermine their worship of the market to disappear.

  22. Fran
    Ill bet the only thing SATP doesnt like about the greens are their views on his poker machines.

  24. @el gordo

    The Greens will be happy that people are reducing their carbon footprints, but the paper doesn’t mention how many elderly people will die unnecessarily next winter because of ‘fuel poverty’.

    Here we have another excellent example of rightwing populist dissembling by the filth merchant dupes and liars. This one falls mainly under the heading false amalgam. In the world of the gross one increases in power costs due to some other cause bear a metaphysical and temporal connection to any putative rise in power costs from any set of measures proposed at any time in the future by those supporting a price on CO2.

    For the gross one, the fact that these rises are the result of asset stripping or under investment or even ad hoc decisions taken while awaiting decisions by the state over CO2 pricing — held up precisely because the gross one‘s fellow travellers have tried with some success to hold up policy in this area is irrelevant. So too is the consideration that if a price on CO2 were imposed, the class of persons named in this Murdochracy report would be fully compensated financially and then some.

    For the gross one, all that matters is the ongoing lie that a price on CO2 would harm the poor, advanced precisely so that the right to pollute with impunity and still impose whatever price rises the rich polluters think fit can persist.

    That said, let us examine this instatiation of the Murdochratic Weltanschauung.

    12 PER CENT of people don’t have enough money to pay household bills

    This sounds plausible, and perhaps even a little low. In this piece though, it is advanced as if the last cause, rising power costs, is the most critical question, when in fact the high price of housing, and to a very large extent the concentration of those on low incomes in outer suburbia with the consequently larger transport costs to access jobs and services, are far more important. Bearing in mind that connection to infrastructure such as water, power, gas, and similar costs more in far flung new estates than it would in established housing in the inner suburbs and this is built into the cost of housing, that people on low incomes, who must bear these costs do it tough is scarcely surprising. Again, this would be an example of how the “free market” fails the social needs of those on lower income, but for the gross one it’s his preferred proximate cause, a future unspecified CO2 pricing scheme that is the problem, rather than what exists now.

    This is the Murdochracy of course so plainly, it too must pay hmage to false amalgam.

    THE impact of surging power prices is more severe and widespread than expected, with a majority of households choosing to shiver through winter – electric heating pushed beyond their budgets … The survey of more than 1350 people found 85 per cent have altered the way they live in an attempt to reduce their electricity bill. In the past year, 55 per cent had used heaters less, making this the most common change.

    Let’s unpick this. Does the fact that 55% of people used heaters less in an attempt to reduce their electricity bills amount to choosing to shiver through winter. Of course not. Firstly, one would need to know how cold winter was in Sydney, and by and large, it just wasn’t that cold. Secondly, as most know, the Federal Government rolled out a very widely taken up home insulation program. The opposition wants to bad mouth that for its own reasons, but even they don’t say that insulation doesn’t work. Maybe people are using electricity less because the combination of insulation and a mild winter have allowed them to have acceptable comfort with less electric heating. AIUI, that’s one of the reasons for having insulation. Thirdly as the Murdochracy‘s mouthpiece stated, whereas at most 36% either lack the money to meet household bills or are finding it hard to “make ends meet”, 55% had reduced their use of heating. Plainly, about 1/3 of those had done so for reasons other than desperation. They changed their priorities based on some combination of a price signal and/or changing needs.

    Nearly half cut their use of air-conditioning. Almost a quarter have returned to washing dishes by hand.

    So that’s a good thing. People are not supposed to be profligate in their use of scarce resources. I have neither a dishwasher nor an A/C and no plans to acquire either.

    Elies and Andrea Raish have been forced to read their meter every day and plot usage as they try to work out how changes in their way of living affect consumption.

    Again, putting aside the emotive “forced“, this is a good thing, especially if they have children. I was brought up re-using brown paper bags, and in our household we had a horror of waste. I used the same lunchbox through my first seven years at school. We were supposed to keep our shoes in good enough condition to pass them onto siblings. Ditto with school jumpers and school cases. We knew when the stuff in the local fruit shop was about to be discarded as non-merchantable and would collect it on the way home from school so that it could be cooked up. Parsimony was in my vocabulary when I entered kindergarten.

    The Dundas parents have ditched their second fridge and stopped running the pool pump. They unplug appliances when not in use. And, once their children are in bed, they switch off the heating.

    Horror of horrors! No second fridge? Good grief. The two grandparents and the five of us in that little house in West Ryde managed with a single small beige-cream coloured Kelvinator with a fascinating “vacation” switch* on it. We had a copper in the laundry and a wringer and a large tub for washing. We had and outside toilet, which we proudly boasted “had the sewerage on”.

    No pool pump? Heavens! Forget electricity: the bill on chlorine alone is crippling. Poor people with inground pools? You have to laugh. During the summer we would put up this aluminium allow circular job with blue plastic lining and a DIY wooden diving stand made from broken up pallets from my father’s job at the MWS&DB.

    And imagine kids under blankets or a doona not having a heater on? You’re not supposed to have an electrioc heater on when you are sleeping. They dry out your airways and are a fire risk, especially in kids’ rooms.

    Bills would be 100 per cent higher in five years, said Ben Freund, of energy cost-comparison service GoSwitch. A carbon price would double that increase, Mr Freund said.

    That is just bogus. It is said that a CO2 price might push bills up by 18% but as noted above, there would be compensation. Nowhere in the article fro the Murdochracy is this mentioned. When lying, the friends (Die (Ben) Freunde?) of filth interest themselves in only one side of the ledger.

  25. Steve at the pub:

    Indeed, the very nature of Convservation would lead one to conclude that political conservatism is more in line with being a conservationist.

    Don’t be confused by the similarity of the words. A conservative just means someone who wants to conserve things in which they have an interest (their wealth for example) the way they are. A (usually nature) conservationist means someone who wants to conserve nature the way it is. So even though they both want to conserve something there is a profound difference in the type of thing they want to conserve. One is about private interest. The other is not.

  26. Lower middle class behavior is restricted, while the upper middle will continue on their merry way. This should see Labor thrown out in NSW.

    You may not have seen this recent UK skit to encourage people to reduce their carbon footprint. WARNING: some have found it shocking and in poor taste.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSTLDel-G9k

  28. @el gordo
    You are not much of a political leftist el gordo at all and you are dishonest as well. Green zealots now is it? How about right wing nut climate science delusionists like yourself? What do you call that….prussian blue zealots?

  29. I’m not sure how the right managed to monopolize the term conservative – I guess in response to 19th and 20th century pressure for social change from the left – but it’s past time we took it back.

    Today’s “conservatives” are more accurately described as “right-wing fundamentalists”.

    I’m a passionate environmentalist, advocate of indigenous rights, and of gay rights, want action on climate change, vote Labor, yet I consider myself conservative.

    Like “socialist”, “conservative” is a term loaded with unacknowledged but nevertheless influential meanings. Like: honest, wise, cautious, hard-working, fair-minded, responsible, realistic, practical – and applied to right-wing fundamentalists, misleading.

  30. No, slash and burn zealots like el gordo are obviously not prussian blue but the brown of smokestack industries, of dying lands and rivers, and of the excretory matter that their arguments so resemble.

  32. Aaaargh! The Gruenpanzerkorps is coming! el gordo will fight them on the beaches, he will fight them in the streets, he will never surrender. The mere fact that even his silly link does not say the German Greens want to rule the world is neither here nor there.

  33. @el gordo
    el gordo – you really know how to dredge up impressive links from semi literate sites dont you?
    The grammar and the spelling in your last link isnt even worthy of the average ten year old.

  35. Im waiting for Finrods arrival here in the sands. Its on the cards. A bravenewclimate pro nuke zealot…swamping to excess and dropping all the lies and damned statistics (of crap pro nuke arguements engineered by “bravenewclimate” website. Will someone please get to the bottom of who funds this …yet another…propaganda stinktank?).

    I wonder if hes getting paid per post???
    …but this is the only place Finrod should be and Ill be right here to welcome him.

  37. @el gordo
    el gordo – the neanderthals were not wiped out by a Volcano. Some are still living and breathing and posting away amongst us (no names…I dont want to incriminate anyone here do I?)

  38. Alice :Im waiting for Finrods arrival here in the sands. Its on the cards. A bravenewclimate pro nuke zealot…swamping to excess and dropping all the lies and damned statistics (of crap pro nuke arguements engineered by “bravenewclimate” website. Will someone please get to the bottom of who funds this …yet another…propaganda stinktank?).
    I wonder if hes getting paid per post???…but this is the only place Finrod should be and Ill be right here to welcome him.

    I’m here alright, although the reasoning given for this seems somewhat odd. I posted a reply to you in the nuclear thread before I saw JQ’s imprecation for me to move on.

  39. Alice :A bravenewclimate pro nuke zealot…swamping to excess and dropping all the lies and damned statistics (of crap pro nuke arguements engineered by “bravenewclimate” website.

    Swamping? I was responding to others.

    What you’ve served up here would go better with a side-dish of mathematics.

  40. Finrod :

    Swamping? I was responding to others.
    What you’ve served up here would go better with a side-dish of mathematics.

    Reinterpreting what others have said is not “responding”.

  42. Alice :</strongI wonder if hes getting paid per post???…but this is the only place Finrod should be and Ill be right here to welcome him.

    That would be nice, especially as I’m currently unemployed, but no. My pro-nuclear advocacy has cost me much more than I ever expect to get back for it. I do it because it’s the right thing to do, and did so earlier this year in the face of threatened dismissal from my job if I continued with it.

  43. @Finrod
    Finrod – glad you said so. Then I will just agree to disagree with you as we do not share the same pro nuclear views. However, I will not give up my right to scepticism of private industries command of resources for the purposes of steering primarily self interested economic policy outcomes all the same. The past behaviour of corporate firms (tobacco and pharmaceutical industries spring uppermost to mind) demonstrates it exists and I do prefer honest unincentivised unbiased scientific research.

  44. @Chris Warren

    The world is trying to move from an old way of doing things to a new way of doing things. Replacing fossil with renewables is an end goal. You do not get end goals in the middle of a game.

    Having that as an “end goal” is far too slow if by “end” you mean 50 years or even 30 years from now. And even if one could accept the shorter of those timelines, one would have to be very confident indeed that it was realistic, because as we have seen, lead times for new systems are quite long. Assuming, for the sake of the hypothesis, that a set of major breakthroughs occurred 30 years from now making it theoretically possible to replace fossil hydrocarbon feedstock with the harvest of renewables at rates commensurate with supplying the likely demand 30 years from now, there would still be a substantial lead time while those systems were built and rolled out, old systems retired, funds raised and so forth.

    How long a lead time? Well as these new fully dispatchable renewables are simply hypothetical, we don’t know. We don’t know what resources will be needed to build them, where they could feasibly be built, how they could be connected to the energy supply or what they would cost. The fact of the matter is that nuclear power — right now — if it were deployed — is capable of fully replacing our existing stationary power resources, and as vehicles are increasingly converted to the grid, could gradually decouple these from hydrocarbon fuels. We could begin retiring old hydrocarbon plants foreclose new plants today.

    Right now, they are a lot more expensive than coal plants, but is that really a problem for anyone who doesn’t see the right to dump toxic effluent into the biosphere as the right of commerical power producers? Not in my opinion. It is very likely that if the state simply chose a good and simple NPP design and tendered for mass manufacture then the marginal cost would decline rapidly to something very much like the coal plants anyway and essentially drive coal out of the business, even if the price on CO2 were fairly modest.

    Now I favour a very significant price on CO2, and don’t like the whole subsidy and picking winners scenario, but we are in a very desperate situation. Some have said we need something like the effort needed in WW2. It’s not merely CO2-forcing of the climate we face but toxic industrial pollution on a grand scale and price-shock inflation as conventional fuel sources dwindle. Either one of these harms could warrant state intervention

    We are currently building an NBN not because there is a pressing need for it right now but because it’s likely in a decade’s time that our current system simply won’t cope and to start building it then will be too late. Right now eneregy generators around the world are contemplating a new generation of coal fired plants with all of the sunk costs these would imply. We could not retire these without sunk costs losses that would put a huge par to the penetration of renewables even if these were, 15 years from now, entirely feasible replacements in technical terms. This is where NSW is going right now. If we don’t stop that right now we will not be saving a place for renewables. We will be blocking all rival technologies for 40 years. Whether we are more energy efficient or get electric cars during that time will make very little difference.

    We have it in our hands to clean up electricity supply over the next 20-30 years and we really should just do it. If a public subsidy really is needed because those in power can’t stomach a proper price on CO2 then let’s not quibble over how neat and tidy or cost-effective the whole thing is. Let’s just do it.

    After all

  45. Alice :@Finrod I will not give up my right to scepticism of private industries command of resources for the purposes of steering primarily self interested economic policy outcomes all the same.

    You seem to think that the mining industry would have some particular interest in promoting nuclear power. Well, the uranium mining industry would (at least if we keep building LWRs), but the rest of the mining industry would be better off lobbying for renewables and continued coal. Kilowatt hour for kilowatt hour they have far more demand for minerals than nuclear power.

    http://channellingthestrongforce.blogspot.com/2010/05/mining-of-nuclear-fuel.html

  46. Finrod :
    @Chris Warren
    What do you mean, Chris? How have I reinterpreted what you had to say?

    Stop playing games.

    You know damn well that no-one was:

    Proposing that wind is OK because the Scots think they can do it

    This was your obvious reinterpretation and all this has already been clearly explained to you.

    So why ask:

    How have I reinterpreted you?

  50. @Chris Warren
    Likewise Chris Warren. I am in agreement with you and I notice the Prof has designated a new sandpit which is just as well because this one has turned into a nuclear waste dump.

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