Update I thought I’d repost this a year on, and reopen the discussion 10 September 2015
Reader ZM points me to a paper with this title, by Graham Turner of the University of Melbourne. Not only does Turner answer “Yes”, he gives a date: 2015. That’s a pretty big call to be making, given that 2015 is less than four months away.
The abstract reads:
The Limits to Growth “standard run” (or business-as-usual, BAU) scenario produced about forty years ago aligns well with historical data that has been updated in this paper. The BAU scenario results in collapse of the global economy and environment (where standards of living fall at rates faster than they have historically risen due to disruption of normal economic functions), subsequently forcing population down. Although the modelled fall in population occurs after about 2030—with death rates rising from 2020 onward, reversing contemporary trends—the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU scenario. In particular, contemporary peak oil issues and analysis of net energy, or energy return on (energy) invested, support the Limits to Growth modelling of resource constraints underlying the collapse.
A central part of the argument, citing Simmons is that critics of LtG wrongly interpeted the original model as projecting a collapse beginning in 2000, whereas the correct date is 2015.
I’ve been over this issue in all sorts of ways (see here and here for example, or search on Peak Oil). So readers won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t buy this story. I won’t bother to argue further: unless the collapse is even more rapid than Turner projects, I’ll be around to eat humble pie in 2016 when the downturn in output (and the corresponding upsurge in oil prices) should be well under way.
Given that I’m a Pollyanna compared to lots of commenters here, I’d be interested to see if anyone is willing to back Turner on this, say by projecting a decline of 5 per cent or more in world industrial output per capita in (or about) 2015, continuing with a sharply declining trend thereafter. [minor clarifications added, 5/9]
John Quiggin 
There are aspects of the 6 points neither Fran nor Tim addressed in their replies. These are aspects which on balance make a carbon tax a better option. These relate to;
(1) Greater price predicitability.
(2) Expeditious implementation.
(3) Transparency.
(4) Less opportunity for financial manipulation.
(5) Addressing every sector. (Actually I would have to examine this claim as it might be doubtful).
(6) Compensation more likely to flow to the poor rather then hidden taxes or “rents” flowing to to market participants, lawyers and consultants.
I think any anyone cognisant of political economy would understand the real weight of these points. If you don’t understand the political economy implications of this debate as well as the economic implications you are not going to get a handle on it. That is my very frank opinion. I think you are vastly under-estimating the slipperiness of the real opponent here, namely financial capitalism. Play their complicated ETS games and I can almost guarantee you they will fool you and fleece you. So yes, I think you are all displaying a great degree of political-economic naievity. I am not the least fazed to incur the frustration of people who don’t understand my points in this light nor of the people who join the cheering squad against me. However, I have made my points and hit a brick wall so I won’t bother further.
BTW, I am still waiting for a substantive reply point by point to the six points. I will read but not post for a while.
Would it be better to move away from economic means to reduce emissions and go for direct action. Actual limits gradually increasing over time, and restrictions on fossil fuel sources.
The British empire would probably still be struggling with slavery if governments tried to end it through taxes and permits.
@Ikonoclast
I’m certainly not part of any cheer-squad against you. I have long admired your passion for doing right on the environment in general and humanity in particular. I wish many more were as keen as you are.
On the other hand, I’m still struggling to see the basis you have for saying carbon taxes are inevitably better as tools of control over emissions than an ETS. Looking at your list above, I see no reason at all for accepting 2-6 as more likely in practice under a tax-based pricing system. And if point 1 were true, I would see that as a disadvantage. Uncertainty about future pricing is likely to spur willingness to invest, providing the perceived risks were on the high rather than low side.
Yet another substance free post by Ikonoclast.
There is no evidence that he is aware of successful cap-and-trade systems like the US Clean Air Act 1990 acid rain amendments that reduced acid rain at only one-fourth the projected cost.
Even the often whiney Union of Concerned Scientists has nice things to say about it.
@Ikonoclast
You’re beating around the bush, Ikon.
The extent to which an ETS can be gamed by speculators, or to which a carbon tax is resistant to financial schemes, is dependent on the design of the system, as I, and the economics commentators you quoted, and Prof Q, already said before.
The only one of the six points which isn’t obviously an unsubstantiated assertion is the first one. Price volatility is a drawback, but whether or not it is fatal to a particular scheme will depend on its other feautres, of course.
As for the others, on what basis is a tax faster to implement than an ETS? Does tax legislation magically make its way through Parliament faster than ETS legislation? Does it encounter less resistance from powerful interests? Was the Clean Energy Future scheme faster to implement than the GST? Why would a tax be more transparent? Is the income tax system more transparent than the share market? Transparency is something that has to be built into a system – it’s not an innate feature of any system. There’s nothing particularly transparent about tax, per se. It can be as transparent or opaque as you want. If you think tax systems don’t provide opportunities for financial manipulation, then you’ve obviously never heard of forestry managed investment schemes. Remember the ‘bottom of the harbour’ scheme? The general opinion about the late Australian ETS was that it was highly unlikely that a secondary market would develop for many years. As for coverage, the scope of a carbon tax or ETS can be as wide or narrow as the scheme designers want it to be. Therer is absolutely no reason whatsoever to suppose that a tax will have wider coverage. And compensation, like transparency, is an add-on that is entirely independent of the central features of the policy. Carbon taxes and ETS schemes can be equally designed to have compensation that flows to the poor, compensation that flows to the rich, or no compensation at all. As they wish. All of them will have ‘rents’ that flow to financial advisers and lawyers. You only need to glance at the Australian taxation system to realise that the idea that taxes don’t result in ‘rents’ flowing to market participants, lawyers and consultants is an utter joke.
I must say I find your claim that those who disagree with you are displaying ‘political-economic naivety’ (‘political economy’ obviously being a polite term for ideology) quite untenable, since it implies a belief that tax policies are somehow more resistant to manipulation by powerful interests, an idea that even a moment’s consideration should dismiss. Remember the mining tax? FFS. I also disagree with the contention that financial capital is the ‘real opponent’ in this context. It is fossil fuel interests. The ‘political economy’ problems that arise with this issue are IMHO twofold: first, powerful interests are opposed to action, and second, the policy-making elites, and the public at large, are overly focused on shorter term concerns. The two problems are obviously related to some degree, in the sense that the former promotes and encourages the latter, and are difficult to address, but neither has the faintest thing to do with whether one should prefer a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.
That is as a substantive reply I can be bothered to summon to your derpishness today. Why should any of us be expected to reply ‘substantively’ to ‘points’ that are nothing more than assertions, the majority of which are obviously dependent on scheme design?
Personally, I don’t really care if there’s a carbon tax or an ETS or even some forms of direct action or a combination thereof, so long as the policy is reasonably well designed and reasonably effective.
But we’ve had this discussion before, as I already mentioned, and you more-or-less admitted that I was right, and that your anti-ETS stance was knee-jerk. You haven’t provided any evidence that your view is any more well-founded than it was then.
I actually wonder what it is that incites me about this so much, apart from general SIWOTI, but I think it might be because it’s such a red herring. The real obstacles, I think, are two problems I mentioned above, and to the extent that wrong-headed obsessions with a particular policy approach lead to people opposing perfectly good policy proposals, they are part of the pbolem, not the solution.
@Gaius X
You do not know what you are talking about.
The US Clean Air Act was part trading permits, but within a framework of direct action setting standards and, in the case of ozone depleting agents – bans (with exceptions).
Sulphur dioxide was a trading system.
Nitrous oxide was a traditional standards system.
Click to access CAA_Nutshell.pdf
Cap-and-trade dogma is simplistic and takes no account of the different commercial environments within which fossil fuel carbon seep into the atmosphere.
Cap-and-trade dogma does not reflect the urgency of our predicament.
I think people should be free to investigate and explore all options without your spittle.
‘pbolem’ = ‘problem’. Aargh.
@Gaius X
I am now aware of it. I referred to a paper on it in a post above your post. However, my posts are typically too long so no blame attaches to you for not reading far enough to find the reference.
@Tim Macknay
Yes, I am beating around the bush. I have nothing new to say on this topic, at least not without considerable further research. I have already said it all without convincing those I regard as some key social-democratic thinkers on this blog namely John, Fran and yourself. Thus I have failed at some stage in my thinking process or my communication process or I have come up against “priors” at least as strong as my own. That “priors” exist for almost all of us on this topic I have no doubt. The issue is not determinable by strict objective truth criteria and repeatable, verifiable empirical evidence from observation or experiment. It is not hard science. No doubt I am suffering from SIWOTI myself.
Maybe I should offer a kind of parable spoken by Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) to his son in “Accidental Hero”. It’s a corny movie but the “parable” or moral is quite good.
Bernie – You remember I was going to tell you about life buddy? Well, thing about life is it gets weird. People are always talking to you about truth. Everybody always knows what truth is, like it was toilet paper or something and they have a supply in the closet. But what you learn is as you get older there aint no truth. All there is is bull…. , pardon my vocabulary here; layers of it, one layer of bull…. on top of another. What you do in life as you get older is you pick the layer of bull…. you prefer and that’s your bull…. so to speak. You get that?
Son – No.
Bernie – Well it’s complicated. Maybe when you go to college… You’re gunna go to college right?
Ikonoklast- at what point in time did you become aware that the US Clean Air Act 1990 contained a cap-and-trade system regarding acid pollutants?
How does your long list of complaints stack up against reality in this particular instance?
I put it to you that your whinge list bears little relation to actual experience.
I put it to you that you have failed to demonstrate the level of knowledge and understanding one would expect of a first year econ undergrad (do you even have a uni degree?) and that the utility of Prof Quiggin reading let alone responding to your comments is zero.
Ivor says I don’t know what I’m talking about yet agrees that the Clean Air Act 1990 was amendmended to include a cap-and-trade system just as I stated. I’m guessing English isn’t your first language so I’ll let your comprehension failure slide.
@Gaius X
LOL.
Click to access Myths_internet.pdf
@Gaius X
Luckily I can read and write English at a acceptable [academic] English level.
try reading the source I provided.
The impact of the Clean Air Act was as described by the USA EPA.
There is no point avoiding this.
Cap-and-trade does not work in isolation, so forget your dogma.
other options are also open provided they also are not in isolation.
There are a fair few academic articles critical of emissions trading schemes – it looks like policy was settled in this direction at Kyoto though so I guess rather than bang their heads on brick walls economists might support them despite evident problems (I still think issuing bonds is a good idea – we got a nice building and plaque in our town for over subscription to the peace drive bond [i am not entirely sure what the peace drive bond was – but the building and plaque are very nice])
This is a very thorough London School of Economics critical article freely available
Regulation Lite: The Rise of Emissions Trading by Robert Baldwin
“There is no doubt about the burgeoning popularity and incidence of trading mechanisms but emissions trading may be a device that can too easily be grasped as a politically convenient panacea. Upon further scrutiny it raises an urgent set of issues regarding the objectives that it serves, its efficiency, its fairness and the transparency with which it operates. The rise of emissions trading also introduces new questions concerning our conceptions of good regulation. This article maps out those areas in which emissions trading gives rise to contention and suggests that the current popularity of emissions trading evidences a shift in conceptions of good regulation – away from well- established notions of regulatory merit and towards models that place new emphasis on the notion of ‘acceptability’ and the virtues of regulation that is ‘lite’ in so far as it is non-threatening to the most powerful interests. This shift, it will be suggested, may demand that we rethink our approaches to regulatory justification and the processes by which we accord legitimacy to regulatory systems.
…
Emissions trading mechanisms have numerous dimensions and there are many varieties of such systems. A basic distinction lies between ‘cap and trade’ and ‘baseline and credit’ approaches.13 Under the former, a fixed number of permits are created and each allows the emission of a stipulated amount of pollutant. These permits are allocated or auctioned to firms who are then free to trade them on the open market.14 In a baseline and credit regime, companies are given performance targets or ‘baselines’ – often set with reference to business as usual projections – and they can generate credits by beating their emissions targets. Such credits may then be traded on the open market. With cap and trade there is a fixed supply of permits for trading whereas in baseline and credit the supply of credits for trading depends on the regulatees’ performance in generating credits by reducing emissions below baselines.
…
Advocates of emissions trading mechanisms are growing in number and tend to claim that a number of virtues attach to the device….
…
As indicated at the start, emissions trading mechanisms raise a series of contentious issues. They are not free from difficulties and brief review of emissions trading’s main alleged weaknesses and areas of contention will indicate the extent to which emissions trading is a device that needs to be justified. Such a review also provides a useful starting point for considering how the rise of emissions trading evidences a shift in both the way governments and others see the role of regulation and the way that regulation may be legitimised.
…
A first issue with emissions trading concerns the objectives to be pursued. A trading process, in itself, offers no benefit to, say, the environment. It does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. What it does do is to provide a way for a given target to be achieved at lowest cost. In a cap and trade system it is the setting of the cap that provides the opportunity for imposing limits on, say, environmental pollution. Within a baseline and credit regime it is the setting of the baselines.
…
It should be noted, here, that in meeting targets with a trading device, much depends on the mode of defining emissions and distributing allowances. If emissions are defined absolutely (i.e. an absolute limit to discharges is set) this targets environmental objectives directly. If, however, emissions are defined relatively (as limits per unit of production) increases in levels of productivity may produce overall increases in emissions even where there is full compliance.
…
Crucial in the EU ETS were the initial allocations or ‘allowances’ for Phase 1 of the regime in 2005-7. Incumbent enterprises were extremely concerned to generate generous allowances that would minimise any potential costs and the emissions trading directive left it to Member States to establish allocation plans. As a result, intense lobbying ensued across the EU so that:
In most cases, these efforts resulted in lax emissions targets, complex special allocations to powerful interest groups and, in some cases, even in an over allocation compared to actual emissions.
…
Powerful interests were able to exploit their informational advantages and to keep the constraining effects of the ETS at bay.40 Environmental pressure groups were thus prompted to protest that the EU ETS had done little to further environmental objectives. As Greenpeace wrote of the EU ETS allocation:
Governments massively over allocated CO2 permits as the market crash in the carbon price has shown …( the price fell by more than 60%)… it was because the system relies on future emissions projections as a method to set a cap and then gives out permits for free. Industry simply inflates its own emissions projections in order to ensure it maximises the number of free permits that it gets – permits that, once allocated, have a significant market value.
…
When the UK revised its EU ETS National Allocation Plan for the post 2007 period, its proposed cap on emissions for Phase 2 of the ETS was higher than for Phase 1 – prompting environmental pressure groups to accuse the UK Government of repeating its over-allocation of permits to the detriment of consumers and the environment.45
The experience described raises doubts regarding the amenability of some emissions trading systems to the progressive adjustment of targets in order to improve environmental protections. Command systems have been criticised on this front46 but it can be argued that emissions trading regimes are similarly beset by difficulties of complexity, uncertainty and delay when approaching the revision of standards and limits.47 There will also be difficulties of lobbying and pressures from potential litigants and these are likely to prove to be at least as severe as those encountered in traditional command regimes.
…
Emissions trading, it is said compares poorly with traditional regulation regarding high-end innovation. This is because trading reduces the incentives for high – cost facilities to innovate in order to save costs.52 As one critic has contended: ‘Why bother making expensive long term structural changes if you can meet your pollution rights from operators that can cut their carbon cheaply?’
…
As one commentator wrote of trading uncertainties: ‘Our results indicate that firms may respond to uncertainty by adopting a “wait and see” approach.’62 The Energy Director of Ernst and Young has argued that movements in carbon prices in the EU ETS had discouraged meaningful investment in carbon reducing technologies and had, instead encouraged the short term trading of positions to optimise returns and limit risks.63In any regime where there is a cap on permits in supply, small changes in demand can lead to large changes in prices. This volatility is particularly damaging in industries such as electricity generation where investment decisions work to long horizons …
…
Some emissions trading systems have been said to involve healthy markets67 but, in others, trading activities have been far lower than expected – and have sometimes been zero.6
…
Some emissions trading schemes have gained reputations for low administrative costs72 but others are complex and, particularly when targeted ‘downstream’ (i.e. towards consumers in the supply chain) will tend to raise difficult issues regarding administrative and transaction costs.73 Thus, when the OECD considered controlling pollution by using tradeable permits to ration mobility in the transport sector, it concluded that fuel taxes would be a cheaper solution. The foremost problems with trading were the administrative costs of targeting a large number of mobile sources and the high transaction costs involved in making permits transferable.74 The OECD stressed that analyses of the transaction costs of trading systems were the key to measuring value added and should be a focus of ex post evaluation studies of controls. To return to the EU ETS, this has been dubbed ‘an administrative nightmare’ whose complexities impose huge burdens of an estimated £62 million on firms and public sector bodies.75 These are said to be felt especially by small plants who are covered by the scheme but contribute little to emissions.
…
An efficient trading system will be one that is based on reliable data and, within which, there are good information flows.77 On this front, an issue with such systems, and notably with baseline and credit approaches78, can be their vulnerability to data manipulation and, when allowances are issued at no cost, the incentivising of such manipulation.79 The EU ETS, again, has exemplified these difficulties – which include not merely the distortion of information but the emission of supra-normal quantities of pollutants so as to earn higher allowances.
…
It should be emphasised that emissions trading markets will generally need regulatory encouragement if they are to develop.82 The rules of trading must be enforced and monitored since non-observance of allowances will undermine the value of trading.
…
Emissions trading systems, indeed, may incentivise lack of enforcement and corruption since unethical members of governments will often be able to both reap personal gains and, at the same time, offer home enterprises competitive advantages. They will do so by allowing permits to be sold, emissions levels to be misrepresented and by taking rewards for this. Emissions trading can be said to place heavy stress on enforcement but to involve enforcement under extremely difficult conditions. A special concern at the global level may be that emissions trading mechanisms involve huge verification challenges and create the dangerous illusion that production patterns in the North can be maintained without harming the climate.
…
A fundamental problem with market-based systems of distribution is that spending power holds sway. Such systems have an inherent bias in favour of those parties who possess wealth and they tend to remove power from those who lack resources.89 The results of trading may be claimed to be efficient but this does not ensure fairness: …’trades of rights in the marketplace may lead to a concentration of property and market power, denying small businesses and poor people access rights to necessary resources (e.g. water).’
…
Sceptics, however, argue that trading systems have a special complexity that does not facilitate access. Such systems, it is complained, overlay market processes on top of the standard-setting procedures usual to command regimes. This duality, it is said, makes citizen participation in emissions trading programmes more difficult than in traditional regulation.116 Thus, it has been protested that … ‘the political invisibility of trading schemes involving large companies may be their weakness. The hope is that emissions can be cut cheaply by large corporations with the public virtually unaware that this is going on. But this lack of public awareness is the very thing that makes schemes vulnerable to industry lobbying, resulting in schemes that are ineffective and unfair.’
…
As far as the UK is concerned, the philosophical significance of emissions trading lies in its shifting the implicit measures of regulatory quality and legitimacy125. Since the late nineties, good regulation has been assessed , across government, with respect to the Five Principles of Good Regulation and the yardsticks of: Proportionality, Accountability, Consistency, Transparency and Targeting126. New concerns to reduce regulatory burdens127 have set the search for good regulation at tension with the quest for less regulation and have evidenced some philosophical confusion within government.128 The rise of emissions trading has taken place amidst that confusion and, it is contended here, has proven consistent with both newly thin notions of legitimacy and a weakening of expectations that good regulation should satisfy the Five Principles.
…
As far as theories of regulatory legitimation and accountability are concerned, there is an important message to be gleaned from the above discussion. This is that there may be material limitations on the extent to which ‘market’ mechanisms can be deployed constructively alongside traditional ‘democratic’ mechanisms of accountability, transparency or legitimation. This suggests, in turn, that a degree of caution may be appropriate regarding the possibility of developing coherent regimes of accountability in complex regulatory systems in which the state is not the sole locus of authority but where control functions are spread across a variety of state and non-state actors.
…”
Click to access WPS2008-03_Baldwin.pdf
The US EPA says:
Sounds like an absolute bloody disaster. LOL.
@Gaius X
You have blown your own argument out of the water.
IF:
WHY IS IT THAT:
WHAT IS:
IF:
Sounds like a bloody disaster. LOL.
I’ll stick for a while to what I believe are useful links.
For “The Political Economy of Global Warming – The Terminal Crisis”
By Del Weston
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415811774/
You can’t read plain English, Ivor. ARP achieved its goals but further research has shown tougher goals are indicated. This is hardly a black mark against cap and trade. The EPA clearly and without reservation declares cap and trade a stunning success.
“In the 1960s, a University of Wisconsin graduate student named Thomas Crocker came up with a novel solution for environmental problems: cap emissions of pollutants and then let firms trade permits that allow them to pollute within those limits.
Now legislation using cap-and-trade to limit greenhouse gases is working its way through Congress and could become the law of the land. But Mr. Crocker and other pioneers of the concept are doubtful about its chances of success. They aren’t abandoning efforts to curb emissions. But they are tiptoeing away from an idea they devised decades ago, doubting it can work on the grand scale now envisioned.
“I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon,” says Mr. Crocker, 73 years old, a retired economist in Centennial, Wyo. He says he prefers an outright tax on emissions because it would be easier to enforce and provide needed flexibility to deal with the problem.
…
Mr. Crocker, who went on to become a professor at the University of Wyoming, is one of two economists who dreamed up cap-and-trade in the 1960s. The other, John Dales, who died in 2007, was also a skeptic of using the idea to tame global warning.
“It isn’t a cure-all for everything,” Mr. Dales said in an interview in 2001. “There are lots of situations that don’t apply.””
http://m.asia.wsj.com/articles/SB125011380094927137?mobile=y
@Gaius X
Just putting “stunning” in front of success, does not help you.
Obviously the program had an impact but as I said it included bans and traditional approaches. The mixed approach was the real engine of success so far.
You need to be wary of government agencies proclaiming success but then stating:
“further reductions are needed”.
There is a difference between spin and reality.
I sympathise with your difficulties.
In any case it is gratifying to see the Marxists are starting to contribute to this issue – judging from Ikon’s link to Del Weston’s book. You will find the problem of corruption and games damaging European ETS at page 46. Also some of the success of ETS has been put down to economic down turn.
So I think a mixed approach is now needed – tax, tradeable permits plus restrictions.
So you thought an ETS and consequent carbon trading was simple and not gameable? Think again.
Click to access Socialist%20Register%20Neoliberal%20Climate%20Policy%20Contradictions.pdf
Whilst I admitted a “good ETS” would work it would seem a “good ETS” is an oxymoron. A good ETS is systemically impossible under late stage financial capitalism.
J.Q. has asked me to quote “the literature” so I am quoting extensively. It just happens to be Marxist literature.
From “Saving the planet or selling off the atmosphere? Emissions trading, capital accumulation and the carbon rent.” by Peter Jones.
“This is what occurred under Phase I of the EU ETS. According to a report produced for the UK Department of Trade and Industry:- ‘The combination of free allocations with full pass-through of marginal costs is estimated to result in increased profitability for the UK power generation sector of approximately £800m/year over Phase I … This represents a direct transfer of value from electricity consumers.’
Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the EU scheme represents a shift from the principle
of ‘polluter pays’ to one of ‘polluter earns’. In other words, although they do not necessarily provide an incentive to pollute, free permits nevertheless effectively transfer wealth to polluting companies at the expense of consumers.”
“Ironically, this flow of windfall profits was only halted with the collapse of Phase I of the EU ETS. Eager to capitalise on what was effectively a ‘free money’ bonanza, many polluters successfully fudged their baseline emissions to convince their governments to hand them extra allowances. So generous were member states in their allocation procedures that, by April 2006, it became clear that there was no scarcity in the market for emissions permits. That is, member states had given away so many rights to pollute that the total number exceeded the total level of business as usual pollution. This lack of permit scarcity destroyed any incentive to reduce emissions arising from the ETS, since within three weeks the price per tonne of CO2
fell from around €30 to €8.50, eventually settling at €0.20 This also destroyed the monetary value of the free permits—though firms which had been clever enough to sell their excess
permits while the price was high still made substantial profits. Some of these were made
at the expense of publicly owned facilities such as hospitals, which needed to buy permits early because they had not successfully played the permit rent-seeking game.”
And:-
Click to access Boehm_et_al_-_proof.pdf
I think free permits if issued at all must be use-it-or-lose-it in the first year. That is they cannot be resold or saved for later. Under carbon tax emissions intensive trade exposed industries (think EITEIs are sweeties) got 94.5% c.t. exemption in 2012-2013. Instead I think they should have gotten something like an administratively simple 20% tariff on competing imports ie from China.
Side story; the Member for Denison is on record for saying that carbon tax was a good thing. However when a business constituent, a zinc smelter, said they were’t keen on it the member ensured they got on the 94.5% exempted list. Good for some not others evidently.
As the discussion above shows, emissions trading schemes have worked well in some cases, not in others. Same is true of carbon taxes. There are good arguments either way. It’s reasonable to argue for one or the other, silly to pretend that there are fundamental differences that make one good and the other a neoliberal plot.
My own views, with respect to Australia, have switched back and forth depending on the political situation, details of the policy and so on. You can go through the archives and look at the different arguments if you are interested.
This critical article looks at ETS as examples of neo-colonialism by wealthy nations of poor nations. (It is critical of reforestation – I myself think reforestation important but it should happen in rich countries as well as poor countries, and the government should revoke tenure and bring the land back to crown land managed by the crown’s parks victoria (and other parks bodies in other stages/commonwealth parks) with the appropriate indigenous traditional owners – not let people /companies profit by reforestation)
Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases by Heidi Bachram
“Although emissions trading is represented as part of the solution, it is actually a part of the problem itself. Despite the scope and gravity of the dangers posed by greenhouse gases, and the major role of emissions trading in compounding them, this arrangement has not been seriously challenged in any international forum. The continuing acquiescence toward emissions trading is not an accident or bureaucratic oversight. The smooth sailing of this arrangement is attributable to the arm-twisting tactics of the richer nations and their constituencies of corporate polluters whenever global treaties are hammered out. The failure of the Kyoto Protocol to deal adequately and effectively with climate change is also representative of wider issues of democratic decision- making and symptomatic of the injustices that permeate international relationships between peoples.
…
Opportunities for fraud abound as the poorly regulated emissions markets develop. This is inevitable in the laissez-faire environment in which emissions trading is conducted. In the first year of the UK’s trial emissions trading scheme in 2002, Environmental Data Services (ENDS) exposed the main corporations involved in the scheme as having defrauded the system. They found that three chemical corporations had been given over £93 million in “incentives” by the UK government for their combined commitments to reduce pollution by participating in the voluntary trading scheme. However, the corporations had already achieved their promised reductions under separate compulsory EU-wide regulations. ENDS estimated that one corporation, DuPont, could make a further £7 million from the market value of the “carbon” credits generated.9 Therefore the corporations had received millions of UK taxpayers’ money for doing nothing.
…
Yet entrepreneurial companies such as FACE International are charging ahead with plantations while propagating the idea that consumers need not change their lifestyles. This new logic dictates that all that need be done is to become “carbon neutral” by planting trees. The majority of these projects are being imposed upon the South.
…
Furthermore, land is commandeered in the South for large- scale monoculture plantations which act as an occupying force in impoverished rural communities dependent on these lands for survival. The Kyoto Protocol allows industrialized countries access to a parcel of land roughly the size of one small Southern nation – or upwards of 10 million hectares – every year for the generation of CDM carbon sink credits.16 Responsibility for over-consumptive lifestyles of those in richer nations is pushed onto the poor, as the South becomes a carbon dump for the industrialized world.
…
Lands previously used by local peoples are enclosed and in some cases they have been forcibly evicted. This was the case in Uganda when a Norwegian company leased lands for a carbon sink project which resulted in the evic- tion of 8,000 people in 13 villages.
…
Formal proposals for trading emissions, however, were not made until the mid- 1990s. By then UNCTAD’s research on greenhouse gas trading was well advanced; it never pursued research on other alternatives, or even on other market-based instru- ments such as pollution taxes. The neo-liberal bias of the UN in this instance seems less a question of succumbing to corporate pressure than of an organizational culture oriented towards corporate-friendly solutions as a matter of course.
…
Yet should a foolproof moni- toring system be put in place, the whole system would lose its appeal of being cheap and unchallenging for corporations, and so any attempt to introduce such methods will be strongly opposed. Furthermore, the neo-liberal trends in international trade make it unlikely that emissions markets will ever be tightly regulated. The strategy and tactics of emissions trading have been adorned with the rationale of neo-liberal ideology; they have become so institutionalized in international forums that regulatory initiat- ives are unlikely to be proposed from within their circles.”
Click to access cns.pdf
While I certainly didn’t support the concessions on permits made to EITEs, this was done in part on the basis that economies were contracting during the GFC and so further burdening such activity would be a bad thing. This was not a function of the ETS but a design feature imposed by politics. Had there been instead a carbon tax based system, the EITEs would have been exempted.
With carbon sink offsets such as forestry there must be the possibility of reverse credits. When for example a plantation of young trees is all set to suck up CO2 for another century a fire could turn those trees back to CO2 perhaps creating a virtual desert for some years. In that case any money received from the sale of carbon credits should be refunded. However from what I can gather supporters say forget refunds hope for better luck next time. The whole exercise is so flaky it proves we must simply burn less fossil fuel in the first instance.
@John Quiggin
We’ll have to agree to disagree then. And you can call me “Silly”. After all, I have nominated left-ish proponents or accepters of an ETS as being “naive” which is only slightly more polite. From my point of view there are sort of paradoxes involved. With respect to CO2 emissions;
(1) Regulation and/or taxes and/or an ETS are necessary under capitalism because this free market system does not inherently cost negative externalities nor distant risks correctly.
(2) Statement 1 makes no comment on how other economic systems would perform with respect to CO2 emissions.
(3) A good ETS would in theory work as well as a good regulation or tax regime. This is where “good” means efficient, effective and equitable.
(4) Under Capitalism, especially late stage financialised capitalism, a “good” ETS is highly unlikely. Indeed I would say the possibility is vanishingly small.
(5) The corollary, under late stage financialised capitalism, is that the possibility of “good” regulation or “good” taxes for CO2 emissions is also vanishingly small.
It’s the nature of the system itself. It’s sole raison d’etre is capital accumulation. This is not to say that the sole raison d’etre of humans, of any class, is capital accumulation, far from it. And this is one source of the contradictions of capital. But enough.
Global collapse when it happens will be profound, but gradual. The thing to realise is that it will be compounded between depleted resources and destructive climate change. The positive aspect is that the effect is applied to adaptive human beings. Human routinely adapt to moving from McMansions to cardboard cartons for accommodation.
The first effect of the “crash” will be financial when the oil price and oil accesss impacts on incomes which impact on debt servicing which culminates in a financial collapse from which there is no conventional recovery. That brings up the interesting thought of what happens to property assets when the banks fail and stay failed. Who owns the property and what happens to it in the long term for in a climate change adapting economy.
Immediately following the financial and property crash will come the technology crash in which most peripheral consumer goods cease to be, initially, affordable then, later, available. Industry at this point steps back a phase and more manual techniques re-emerge expanding employment for a time. Old machinery becomes commercially viable and valuable.
Once property values drop to a third of the present there will be a period of relative stability and consolididation with the primary variable becoming destructive climate factors. Look to the Phillipines and Pakistan to see how that might impact. In Australia’s case it is likely to be a grab bag of destructive winds coupled with fire, and deluge events coupled with flooding, and with the occaissional snow dump thrown in.
One of the significant issues will be the very poor quality of the build constructions of today and their suitability for the coming climate, on the one hand, and the future economy on the other. Whereas the buildings are aesthetically pleasing and of high quality spacial design, that materials from which they are built have been steadily reduced to give the benefit of maximum enclosure for minimum cost. A good example of how design creep can lead to wide scale property loss occurred in Christchurch NZ where there had not been a significant snow dump in the city itself for 40 years. During that time house guttering design change dramatically and a little feature called a snow strap was forgotten. So when in the 1990’s the city experienced a huge snow dump over the whole city most recent construction lost their guttering from the roof snow load, and a number of buildings collapsed both commercial and domestic. One of the key features that caused collapses was the inappropriate use of gang nail plates in roof trusses, this being universally applied in Australian housing construction. Here the problems are many fold. The original designs for these were based on the wood of the time. With climate change construction timbers have become softer. The design of the plates have change incrementally for production ease and some of the original design intent has been lost. construction timber sections have reduced. The understanding of the placement limitations for gang nail plates is not well understood. The Libertarian mantra of cheapest (most specialised) is best is only viable in a static climate/environment (all senses). Even in nature extreme specialisation ultimately leads to extinction.
There should be a massive amount of study underway to fully assess our future vulnerabilities, and it is typical of human civilisation when the need is the greatest the will is the least. So our universities will become less able to prepare for the future ultimate collapse, and it is not surprising that the move less affordable and less available teritary education is coming from the Libertarian quarter.
Aaaggh! I wrote “It’s” when I should have written “Its”. Why do these bad writing habits infect us when we know better?
On tax verse trading schemes, i am sticking to the idea of a levy with proceeds directly applied to solving the problem ie build specific infrastructure to achieve maximum impact in the shortest possible time. Time has run out for designed marginal economic influences to affect large scale change as the primary climate action mechanism. Direct intervention is necessary from here forward. We have a very small period of climate ease being delivered from a weaker solar maximum but should we fail to reduce emissions when the sun turns up the heat next we will certainly burn.
See Climate4you / sun and make up your own mind as to what is going on and what will happen next.
@Hermit
A simple solution would be to require an insurance policy covering the period during which the sequestration supported the credit. This could be expressed in tCO2e per annum held. A permit with a covering insurance policy for 100 years would be worth ten times that of one only covering 10 years. Because of the long lead times, premiums would need to be vested annually, to prevent the state becoming, effectively, a potential creditor.
An alternative option would be to require each certificate of biosequestration to be reviewed each year, so that any so extinguished would need to be renewed, if an examination showed that their sequestered carbon had been returned.
Plainly, some forms of biosequestration are going to be more secure (but more expensive to implement) than others. It would be absurd if robust and expensive forms were treated the same way as comparatively frivolous ones.
As a general principle of course, I agree — we ought to extract less chemical energy (a lot less) from fossil hydrocarbons. Not creating the pulse in the first place is obviously more effective than trying to claw it back. Given that this is not going to happen for some time, partially on technical feasibility grounds, we do need to have some way of clawing back those emissions which are in practice unavoidable or already in the various temporary sinks.
@BilB
What you say makes a lot of sense to me. Taking the anecdotal approach, I will say this. The house I grew up in north Brisbane was not a classic Queenslander (you know verandahs and stilt stumps). However, it was a classic post-WW2 Housing Commission house built in or about 1950. It was solid hardwood consctruction throughout except that the roof was corrugated fibro (super 6 I think it was called), the walls were fibro to the picture rail and above the picture rail including the ceiling the lining was a kind of cane fibre board. I don’t recall the proper name for it.
However, to get back to the hardwood business. OK, admittedly the floors were softwoodI think, not sure which type. But all framing including the roof framing was solid hardwood and the weather boards too were hardwood. It was on low concrete stumps My father built two more large rooms on to the house using the same solid construction methods and materials except for masonite for the wall linings. The fibro roof was eventually replaced (porbably after a bad hailstorm with a colorbond roof. These houses were and are solid. Properly painted, maintained and kept free of termites they could probably last several hundred years.
When I was in Russia in 1991, I saw traditional Russian wooden houses in villages and these houses were indeed hundreds of years old. I am not sure what timbers were used in them. But the point stands that old fashioned, solid wooden houses can stand for 100s of years. I doubt that many modern houses would achieve this even if maintained and not re-developed.
Our first house (wife and I) was also in north Brisbane and was of late 1960s vintage. It was relatively flat-roofed (not such a good idea) with corrugated iron but again with all hardwood construction with hardwood chamfer boards. I guess the style could be called “Californian Bungalow” though it was full house size. (I always think of a bunglaow as a small beach holiday house). This house has superb brush box timber floors with long individual planks that for example ran mostly the entire length of a very long hallway. You cannot get hardwood timber flooring that long ad that good now for love or money. All that type of timber is gone.
Our current house we had built and it has softwood frames and is supposed to be rated just one storm category below cyclone. I wonder how good my gang nail plates are? And I now have 22 solar panels on one section. Weight issues? Windage issues? One positive is that our exterior wall sheeting is 5 ply or 7 ply exterior grade plywood (I forget which) with some corrugated iron outside feature walls. Why is this good? Well, it essentially makes the entire house a monocoque with a frame that on its own is rated severe storm below cyclonic. (Because most forms of sheeting don’t supply signifiant extra structutal strength.) The house is as tight as a drum. I doubt most modern houses are nearly as solid. The hardwood timber floor is mostly in disappointingly short and different coloured timbers.
The point of the anecdote? Not much point really but I back up your statement that many good design features, meehods and materils both structural and passive have been lost. For example, high ceilings. My house has 2.7 m ceilings, Many modern houses have 2.4 m ceilings. Old Queenslanders, though not my parents post WW2 house, had celings up to 3.3 m.
When I stand in a 2.4 m ceiling house on a sweltering Brisbane day, I can feel the heat beating off the ceiling in a way I cannot in my house. Some old Queendlander ceilings may have been too high leaving dead un-circulated air up there at least without fretted wood grills which some of these houses had above internal doors. The point is that high ceilings are good passive design for hot climates but ceilings have been brought down to save on materials and costs, Given the outrageous price of modern houses you wonder where the surplus profits have gone. Actually you don’t wonder.
To cut a long story short, our standard Qld housing stock is now flimsier, less climate friendly in some ways thus necessitating more air-con, lower to the ground (more flood and termite issues), uses more softwood (more termite and wood-rot issues). I would think a lot of this stock won’t last very long and won’t stand up well to climate change. Modern furnishings burn rapidly and fiercely too so you only have about 3 minutes literally to get safely out of a burning house.
All good observations Ike, and I suggest that you keep looking around your part of the world and make some mental calculations of the survivability of your community under both economic collapse and climate attack.
An example of the nature of the risk posed by gang nail plates came to me in a walk around ChCh after the first of the more recent series of snow dumps. I saw a husband and wife supporting each other looking down their driveway. What they were looking at was their recently constructed triple car garage. The broad shallow angle roof had due to its span had the lower tension members joined in the middle with nail plates. The truss members were made of pine in the “new” 2 by 4 section. With the snow load (which was not that much really) the truss tension members came apart like a zipper (once one went they all went) bring the whole roof down on their three cars, and in the so doing pushed the side walls out. A complete loss, building and contents. The city’s architect designed and structural engineer certified skating rink suffered the same fate when its truss tension members failed but for different reasons.
The risk posed by the nail plates is small under normal environmental conditions, it is when buildings experience unscheduled service loads that something normally considered safe becomes a liability.
But that is just one of many risk elements that have crept into our construction formula.
Thanks a lot for that post. It helped to restore my inner balance. I just took a summer course which should have had a completly different content from the course description and forced me to write sort of an essay that took this sky is falling club of rome stuff seriously )-: ( no not the more generous interpretations, the immidiate disaster is on the edge we have to stop all economic growth now interpretation)
@hix
Where is there this:
??????
I can only assume Hermit is remarkably unfamiliar with Australian flora or best practice plantation management practices. There is no reason why fire should be anything more than a trivial matter in carbon sequestration plantations.
A range of species including Eucalyptus globulus regenarate very well after fire.
My Eucalyptus bicostata plantation burned in 2011 at 4 years of age with about a 3% loss rate and most non-plant people can’t tell a fire ever happened.
Seagrass meadows are another patently obvious candidate for carbon sequestration with much greater potential than land reafforestation. How come no-one has even mentioned this?
And speaking of carbon sequestration, it is worth checking out the Global CCS Insitute website. While CCS is widely viewed as politically incorrect, it is growing quite nicely although this is off a small base:
As I see it, there are 101 irons in the fire and another few hundred waiting development.
I can see the global warming scare fizzing out just like the Y2K scare and every other scare I’ve lived through because it is trivially easy to deal with. I think John is quite correctly making the same point.
It is also abundantly clear to me that the doom merchants are lazy people who revel in their own ignorance. I guess it makes them feel important.
@Gaius X
Hermit’s concerns about climate change and bush fires are valid. Climate change will increase bushfire intensity and frequency in many areas of Austrialia which will be hotter and drier and/or have longer dry spells. The realities about bushfires are far more complex than one clearly relatively mild fire event in a tiny locale suggests.
“Frequent fires can have many effects, which are mostly negative.
1) They can kill many plants before they reach reproductive age thus not allowing them to produce seed. If fires are repeated often enough the plant will become locally extinct.
2) Trees use their reserves of starch to grow new leaves, bark and branches so if burning occurs frequently they will eventually run out of reserves and die. Areas that are regularly burnt exhibit smaller and fewer trees. Trees often appear less healthy and may begin to look mallee-like.
3) Seeds require rain soon after a fire has occurred in order to germinate or they will soon die. Frequent burning without following rain will result in a loss of plants and possible desertification.” – Fire and the Australian Biota, Australian Academy of Science: Canberra.
@Gaius X
Lunacy.
@Gaius X
John is quite correctly making a different point.
An amusing sidebar is that one of those associated with the Y2K nonsense was involved in the early climate change denier movement.
@Ivor
That kind of thinking:
http://steadystate.org/
@Gaius X
Correction
You didn’t mention this, why?
Thanks for the concern over my tree knowledge. I am in fact surrounded by old growth, regrowth and plantations of shining gum and radiata. So much so I fear incineration which is why I have a fire bunker 3m underground with a surface solar panel charging a battery for lights, laptop, radio etc. It also stores pumpkins, jars of tomato salsa and a copy of the house insurance policy. An evident effect of frequent fires is displacement of eucalypts by short lived wattles. The soil becomes harder and dryer with less organic material. Clearly the net carbon storage is less than for an infrequent fire regime.
Therefore part of the deal for selling forestry carbon credits is that the land owner must put in a max effort to control fires. We’re talking our eye off the ball of reducing fossil fuel use if we think carbon sinks are more reliable than they are.
@Hermit
I agree and I am pleased to find something we can agree on. The whole carbon sinks / carbon credits thing is partly being run as a scam. Sure, natural carbon sinks are real and some human-made carbon sinks might be real and have some long term effectiveness but the whole area needs to be assessed on a case by case basis. I put reforestation in the natural category and CCS in the human-made category.
Reforestation has many values not just the potential carbon sink value. So, we should be pursuing reforestation vigorously on all fronts in any case. The carbon sink value of forests (from our point of view now) will only manifest itself with a continuing annual increase in total area covered by forest on the planet. This increase must go on for decades and indeed centuries continuously. Earth Policy Institute declared as of 31/8/2012 that world forest area was still on the decline. I don’t imagine the decline has been arrested yet. A hotter climate will make it extremely difficult to increase forest cover. You have outlined some the reasons.
The main game is reducing fossil fuel use as you say. I am not a nuclear power advocate but the reality is we have a current fleet of reactors which will run (with some retirements and some new plant) until about 2050 without a change in fuel type or number of fuel cycles to extend that. The indicators are that the reactor fleet cannot be enlarged quickly enough to help with climate change and also that we will substantially run out of uranium as a fission fuel by about 2050 on current cycle use. I know you won’t believe that Hermit but I have read enough scientific papers to convince me. Thorium fuels, breeder reactors and fusion might change that eventually but again not on a timescale to prevent enough CO2 emissions to in turn prevent dangerous global warming.
Even 2 degrees C of global warming is very serious. “Scientists believe the world is still on track to become more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer – and that potentially means whole ecosystems could be wiped out.” – ABC. With 2 degrees C of warming, a global average, various regions of Australia could see increases in minimums and maximums of double that or more and many, many more hot days. So your concerns about radical and permanent change in vegetation cover are justified but I am sure you know that.
The chances of the world economy voluntarily reducing fossil fuel use rapidly enough to prevent more than 2 degrees C of warming now seem vanishingly small. I suspect a variant of Jevon’s paradox will apply. All supplementary power sources we develop, or develop further, from nuclear power to renewable power will simply be fed into the maw of the capitalist “endless growth” machine along with all the coal, oil, gas and (hope forbid) maybe the methane clathrates. The tendency will be to use everything, every scrap of it.
Given the above, our only hope of preventing serious global warming exists in changing our economic system away from oligarchic, endless growth capitalism or in an economic collapse. It’s strange to say but collapse and particularly an early collapse is one of our best hopes at least long term. The current power of oligarchic capitalism (economic, security and military) is so great that the case is a successful anti-capitalist revolution is well-nigh impossible, at least while this system keeps on delivering. And it does deliver for many people although not for a global majority.
Thus a collapse will have to proceed global revolution(s). Only a collapse can and will lead to revolutionary change. Since a collapse is inevitable (IMO), it follows that revolution(s) are inevitable. Whether all this will lead to “socialism or barbarism” is anyone’s guess. I don’t pretend to know. Under collapse, barbarism will take the form in some regions of anarchy, tribalism and local and regional warlordism. The trajectories of the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan indicate they are already on this path. In other regions, “barbarism” would likely take the form of oligarchic dictatorship. Against all this, the only hope lies in genuine socialsim; democratic and consisting of worker cooperatives where workers (and their dependents) own, manage and direct all production.
Ikonoclast,
This
“Thus a collapse will have to proceed global revolution(s). ”
Is not true. If you look at all of the recent revolutions (Arab Spring), the primary cause is government not reacting appropriately to the greater body of people. Economic collapse is not a factor. If it were then the many other collapsed countries (Madagasca, Haiti, North Korea, Zimbabwe) would have been in revolution long ago. There are plenty of instances where changing the government players has made situations worse. Where the government is believably working in the publuc interest revolution is not an option.
hix,
“we have to stop all economic growth now”
Well whether we should/have to facilitate growth/de-growth has not been the topic of discussion – the topic of discussion has been Turner’s report Is Global Collapse Imminent?
A climate scientist from the very well regarded Tyndall Centre in the UK – Kevin Anderson – has said he no longer thinks economic growth in advanced countries is congruent with reducing ghg emissions in the necessary time frame.
Also – economic growth in advanced countries has since the 1979s/1980s largely been at the expense of poor countries from whom advanced economy countries exploitatively take land, resources and labor at low cost.
Also – the current rates of material consumption in advanced – and possibly even middle – economy countries is far too high and just off the top of my head is causing deforestation, species loss, loss of biodiversity and ecological integrity, social upset as poor people have to be migrant labourers and mothers leave children behind, soil degradation, too many things seen as landfill and left in land fill, rubbish in the ocean, over fishing etc etc
So coordinated de growth in advanced economies is preferable until our consumption gets to a sustainable level, but some poor people in poor countries should be able to have a reasonable amount of material consumption and not gave to be hungry and have to live in squalid conditions in tent cities or slums.
But that was not the topic – the topic was about collapse. In the model the downturn starts around now as more capital goes towards getting non-renewable resources (turner posits the gfc as an example related to peak oil) – then this affects industrial production and food production as follow ons – then service provision is affected too (like the federal government is cutting services now) – also death rates increase etc – by around 2100 collapse has meant a return in many areas to early 20th C conditions.
Fixed that for you, ZM.
@BilB
Well, I would take the view that food and fuel price rises and shortages were important causative factors in the poorly named “Arab Spring” in Tunisia and Egypt to name two. The civil war in Syria (obviously a multi-sided, attempted ongoing violent revolution) has followed on from severe drought stress, some food stress and much dislocation of the rural population to the cities following the partial failure of agriculture in Syria. The droughts seem to have a climate change component added to normal climate cycles and variability.
Collapsed or semi-collapsed countries in some cases are under extreme levels of authoritarian supression for example Nth. Korea. Others have the pressure release valve of aid, especially food aid as in Haitii. Others collapse into warlordism for long periods. Somalia for example.
An MIT study (IIRC) found a clear correlation between food prices/shortages and civil unrest over about the last 25 years. Revolutions don’t automatically occur and they are not automatically successful. But severe economic collapse and especially food and fuel shortages greatly increase the likelihood of riots, insurrections and eventually revolutions. The powers that be, especially authoritarian powers, react back with ever more violent suppression.
Effective worldwide revolution against capitalism would have to occur first in a great power, probably the USA, before it could sweep the globe. This is because of the hegemonic power of the USA and more paticularly its oligarchic elite. Outside of Russia and China and a few of their satellite and client states, the USA can pretty much control the globe to its liking. It is not going to permit any kind of revolutionary challenge to capitalism in its hegemonic sphere or hemisphere.
Modern security, suppressive and military apparatus has attained such a size and degree of sophistication that peasant or working class revolutions with machetes to AK47s are often not viable. Only the state can and does wield riot trucks, APCs, tanks, artillery and air power in any real quantity and quantity. This can work for a long while as Syria’s example shows. That is not to say Bashad can retain power indefinitely.
I agree “there are plenty of instances where changing the government players has made situations worse”. Starting a violent revolution opens a door to dark room. But I don’t believe revolutions are started by considered thought. They might be theorised and guided (partly) by considered thought but they are started by desperation engendered by poverty, oppression and finally near-starvation. They are susccessful or not subject to the sort of provisos I made above.