Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
The Earth System nudged the +2.0 °C global mean daily 2 m surface air temperature again on Dec 3, per a tweet by Prof Eliot Jacobson:
While leaders smile and sell us greenwashed dreams and messiahs of hope spread their messages.
Again the social costs of climate change and global warming are being underestimate at a COP conference. Too many fossil fuel providers are looking only at the money benefits of doing nothing and not considering the social costs of doing nothing, or even not enough. Lives lost due to air pollution, heat waves, extreme weather events and rising sea levels are the most egregious social costs. Only when it is people they know who are dying, will world leaders actually do anything that will stop global warming. By then it will be too late for most people on this planet.
Hamas casualties
The Palestinian death total published by the Gaza Ministry of Health is for all casualties, including Hamas fighters killed in combat, and they do not pretend otherwise. They do break out children. On 5 November (Al Jazeera), children amounted to 4,008 of a total death toll of 9,770, or 41%. It’s not clear what age cutoff they are using, but the CIA World Factbook gives a prewar proportion of 44% of the total population under 15. The casualty rate is consistent with this – and with the inference that Israeli bombing is in fact indiscriminate, whatever its intentions.
The total death toll has since climbed to 15,200 (ABC News, 2 December). We can break this down into reasonable estimates of 6,200 children, 4,500 adult women, and 4,500 adult men. Hamas does not SFIK use women as frontline combatants. The adult male population includes the disabled, teenagers too young to fight, seniors too old to fight, and workers in protected civilian occupations like health, emergency services, food delivery, etc. Hamas’ recruitment pool is say half the adult males. Moving from pretty solid data to guesswork, let’s say they can convince at most half again to join up – far more than any other revolutionary movement in history. That would give 1,125 expected militant combat deaths.
The IDF claims a 2:1 ratio of civilian to militant deaths, giving 5,000 of the latter.
( https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-military-civilian-ratio-killed-intl-hnk/index.html ) I don’t think we can believe this: 5,000 is more than the corresponding share of the entire adult male population in my demographic scenario. What can the IDF claim be based on? They drop 2,000 lb bombs on apartment blocks, killing everybody inside, and are not present when the corpses are dug out and counted.
BTW, the Gaza Health Ministry has a pretty good reputation for trustworthy data, which has been cited in the past by the US State Department among others. The AP reported that while Hamas is the government in Gaza, the health sector is oddly enough a joint responsibility with the PLA. Health administrators in Gaza come from Fatah as well as Hamas. They did screw up on the hospital bomb that turned out to be a dud Hamas rocket, a case of jumping to conclusions rather than fabrication.
I am not even going to think about trying to pretend this isn’t all totally awful. (Plus, I don’t want adult Palestinians to die either, of course.)
I don’t quite agree that the word “indiscriminate” applies – but I am pretty far away, and I have never been a soldier, so my perspective is limited. Plus I still blame Hamas for all of it, entirely and pretty much without reservation.
Having said that, and bearing in mind the mistakes we here made in our recent past … I hope perhaps they can switch to a legal strategy soon. I look forward to seeing all kinds of audits and tracings and sanctions (and removals?) and anything else we can think of. Here are people I want to de-fund. Harrumph. (Mind you, I suppose the world of international finance is not under contral. Maybe this won’t work.) I gather there are already criminal investigations.
We can pray for peace, meanwhile. I agree, this is all a disgrace for humanity. Also, we should have more female politicians over there, maybe. I don’t see how it could hurt to try that.
Oh … just to be clear, the people I want “removed” are the people in my country who are funding terror. (I assume there are a bunch.) And UN – I’m giving you side-eye right now! Yeah, big time.
I am not saying anything about removing people in other places, which is up to those people, not me.
It is naive to suggest that all that is happening in the Gaza Strip and West Bank had its origins on October 6th. The roots of these war crimes goes back decades. There would be no Hamas without the decades of aggression by the IDF. In the West Bank the illegal settlers are as much to blame as Hamas. These criminals force Palestinians out of there homes at gunpoint. My brother went to this part of the Middle East and was appalled at the aggression that was part of the ordinary life of Palestinians in the West Bank. Nothing is done to reign in the actions of these illegal settlers who are all from Israel. As for the Gaza strip, the IDF thinks it can just kill whomever it chooses. They make claims they can never verify, using these claims to bomb hospitals, schools and refugee camps. This is a war crime. It is no good saying that October 6th justifies killing children and the elderly. Do they hold guns? Do they send missiles? Ridiculous. It is the height of cowardice to drop bombs from jet planes onto residential homes that house little children and elderly people unable to seek shelter. I will never condone such atrocities. Before October 6th, Israel imprisoned thousands of Palestinians, many of them women and children. They are responsible for the hated felt for the IDF and the Israeli government. No false news, unjustified claims, hypocrisy and sheer murderous intent of the IDF and its masters.
We seem to have a disability epidemic in Australia that is growing by the day. The NDIS review claims the following:
“There are currently more than 630,000 Australians on the NDIS — many of the recommendations are designed to ensure there is more mainstream support available to the estimated 4.4 million Australians with disability who are not on the NDIS.”
There are currently 26.6 million Australians so 2.3% of our population are currently on the NDIS with 4.4 million others with disabilities, or 16.6% who should be on it but are currently not. Adding these figures together 18.9% of our population are “disabled”. I put the “…” around this figure as I I am ever so slightly slightly unsure this figure is believable.
12% of little boys in Australian aged 5-7 years are on the NDIS. Less young girls for some reason.
Labor’s solution to the explosive growth in the $42b NDIS is to try to get many of the services provided by the NDIS paid for by the states with funding for this, announced today, by increased GST revenues from the Commonwealth. . For example autism treatments will be dealt with in schools. This doesn’t do much more than sweep the concerning aspects of this disability epidemic under the carpet – almost 20% of our population is “disabled” and assistance to this 20% must be paid for from the public purse in some way.
The Gillard monster will continue to grow although some of it will be better hidden. The difficulty is that reversal is almost impossible even if miracle cures for the disability epidemic are uncovered. Politicians are normally a gutless lot but gutlessness will rise to new heights if , facing the possibility of adverse electoral implications, our pollies are asked to withdraw or reduce funding to those with “disabilities”.
Confirmed rumours today that Woodside and Santos are thinking of merging. Woodside is capitalised at $62b while Santos is $24b. The merger would result in an enterprise more than 1/3 the size of BHP. A big deal particularly given Woodside’s recent acquisition of BHP’s oil and gas interests.
Both stocks seem to me undervalued even given the facts of the transition toward renewables. Woodside sells at about 5x earnings and Santos 7.5X earnings reflecting dim market views about their future earnings. In my view they seem underpriced even given pessimistic future assessments. I might be wrong – taking a punt here is a punt on the speed of global responses to climate change. The complaints about failure to meet Greenhouse targets from environmentalists if anything steady my view that these companies will be around for quite a while.
But would a merger boost values? One argument against the merger is that people might reduce their overall exposure to this seemingly risky sector via a pure play on one firm alone. But I think oil and LNG – have a future irrespective of Australia’s drift toward increased reliance on renewables and this combined enterprise would generate enormous cash flows. Most of the LNG will be exported to Asia where demands will be sustained for a long time yet.
I’ve commented on the Substack site, which seems to have more active readers. Plea to John: please make up your mind and reunite your reader community. I don’t see anything in the Substack content guidelines that would prevent your keeping the useful Message Board going there. The Sandpit has IMHO outlived its usefulness.
I (Ikonoclast) don’t comment much anymore. I could be wrong but I don’t think J.Q. is looking for an online commenting community anymore, although he appears to be still looking for an online reading community via stacks and magazine articles and also is practicing his writing.
The die is cast. Climate change and other non-sustainability problems mean something like 6 billion excess human deaths will occur over the rest of this century. This will be over and above current or, more precisely, 2018 mortality rates. These deaths will likely be front-loaded into the first half of the remaining years of this century.
See “Yes, the Climate Crisis May Wipe out Six Billion People” – The Tyee.
The only thing I would cavil with is the “may”.
There is not really anything anyone can do at this point other than try to be non-destructive and to live least non-sustainably as possible. Locked into our system for short to mid-term survival it is not really possible for us to be sustainable. The overshoot is far too great. We (humanity) wasted 40 years and not just wasted it but doubled down on endless growth and the selfish pursuit of ever-greater personal wealth piles in contradiction to the need for shared good and environmental sustainability.
Further palaver is useless. Unstoppable material processes and catastrophic consequences are in train.
Harry Clarke: – “But I think oil and LNG – have a future irrespective of Australia’s drift toward increased reliance on renewables and this combined enterprise would generate enormous cash flows.”
Then that means human civilisation and billions of people don’t have a future. There’s enough to know we/humanity are currently on a trajectory towards civilisation collapse before the end of this century.
I’d suggest what is ‘settled’ is that:
1. The Earth System is warming – for example, see Fig 24 in Hansen et al. (2023);
2. The Earth System will continue to warm while the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) remains in a net energy gain state – for example, see Fig 25 in Hansen et al. (2023);
3. The EEI has doubled since the first decade of this century. That means the warming rate is accelerating.
4. Unless the EEI is reduced to a zero net energy gain state planet Earth will continue warming. That requires:
– – a) zero human-induced GHG emissions;
– – b) atmospheric carbon drawdown;
– – c) increasing planetary albedo, particularly in the polar regions.
5. As the planet warms more locations on Earth will become progressively unlivable.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305427120
6. Observations from space show that the rate of sea level rise is increasing, and has “more than doubled” since 1993.
7. Glaciologists have found, in study after study, that both of the planet’s remaining ice sheets are losing overall mass at an accelerating rate. Both the North Greenland and West Antarctic ice shelves are destabilizing.
8. Multi-metre SLR is now unstoppable unless the planet cools. SLR will change every coastline.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/hazards/sealevelrise/sealevelrise-tech-report.html
The Hansen et al. (2023) paper includes (bold text my emphasis):
Professor Johan Rockström, Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said from time interval 0:21:28 (bold text my emphasis):
“So, dear friends, what, what tends to be forgotten is that we’re in the middle of a climate crisis and that the only way to have a safe landing, to hold the 1.5 °Celsius, is a global sustainability transformation. Phasing out coal, oil and gas is actually – and I know this comes across often as a provocative statement – but that’s the easy part of the challenge. That’s the easy part of the challenge. We need to transform the food system, keep nature intact, and scale negative emission technologies in an unprecedented way. All of this has to occur, simultaneously, to have a safe landing. That’s where we are at, and this requires – which I will be kind of arguing in the continued part of this talk – a planetary boundary approach, because we have to have the checks and balances across all the systems of the planet, even if we only care about holding 1.5 °Celsius – one of the nine planetary boundaries. So, that’s where we are. And unfortunately, if you take the latest IPCC and UNFCCC assessment of the journey we’re following, even after the last stock-take on the Nationally Determined Contributions that were performed just before the New York climate week in September this year, we’re following a pathway that takes us to 2.7 °Celsius by the end of this century. And let me just be very clear from the outset, that is, without any hesitation in science, a path to disaster, That’s a path to disaster. We have no evidence, whatsoever, that we can support in a dignified and responsible way, eight, soon to be 9 billion people in the world as we know it, at anything above 2 °Celsius. Actually, we’ve not been at that point for the past 4 million years, at the 2.7 °Celsius level. So this is why we are talking about urgency – that we really need to move this around very fast. Now, is this only me standing here saying this? Well, actually no. The scientific communities now today, are very well, has a very strong consensus here.”
Geoff, I didn’t mean to caste doubt on your evangelical mission. Climate change is a serious issue and I favour prompt action for dealing with it. What I was suggesting was that the prices of equity in these firms suggests how informed markets see the likely outcome. My argument is not normative at all. It is mercenary as I seek to invest wisely. My investments have no impact on climate outcomes..
The low current prices for oil and gas producer equity suggests optimism about the pace of the global transition to renewables. I am more pessimistic and think LNG and oil will be around for a long time – particularly in the transport sector and in developing countries. I think the optimism about the successful transition has led to underinvestment in oil and gas production and this will provide future opportunities for firms like Santos and Woodside which means they may now be undervalued. If they do merge they will be generating a lot of cash that they could invest across a wide range of projects globally. It would be a huge business.
The main qualification to my views is coming about in China where renewables technology is flourishing at an amazing pace. Globally too.
Click to access updated_-SolarMfg_CEF_14June2023.pdf
Not arguing morality but what plausibly will happen:
Quote: “After spending much of the last decade talking about decarbonisation and, in some cases, chasing renewable energy projects, big energy companies have gone long – very long – oil and gas, amid an energy transition that suddenly looks worryingly slow.”
“Woodside and Santos have long made the argument that gas has a long and profitable future ahead of it as a transition fuel, and their merger would embody this view.
Size would not just give an enlarged Woodside clout in global markets. The merger would allow it to claim national status, and push for greater political support in what has become a very challenging regulatory environment”.
https://www.afr.com/chanticleer/woodside-santos-merger-makes-sense-now-for-the-hard-part-20231207-p5epz1?utm_content=INTRO&list_name=4B181861-C469-4BE5-BAC9-E0F4CF050B01&promote_channel=edmail&utm_campaign=word-from-the-editor&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=2023-12-08&mbnr=MTc0OTg4&instance=2023-12-08-16-17-AEDT&jobid=30071141
Harry Clarke: – “Not arguing morality but what plausibly will happen: …”
What are you arguing, Harry? Money/profits/power are a higher priority than the preservation of human civilisation (including culture/knowledge) and the lives/livelihoods of billions of people, aye Harry?
Perhaps the elites at Woodside, Santos, etc. think they (and their families) are immune from the Laws of Physics? Money and technology will save them?
Perhaps the elites haven’t thought through that with the collapse of global civilisation then their suicidal pursuits of money/profits and positions of power likely become worthless/lost? Where does that leave them and their loved ones?
Are you cheering for them in their endeavours, Harry?
Geoff Miell
No to the second sentence.
Don’t know to the second last sentence.
No to the last sentence.
My question. Have you ever tried to understand a simple argument?
Electric anecdatum
Spain, where I live, has time-of-day variable electricity pricing even for retail customers like me, who also pay a quite steep standing charge for capacity. A local paper prints the hourly table. This is today’s, December 10: https://www.surinenglish.com/spain/updated-daily-electricity-prices-spain-20230224124137-nt.html
The price never rose above 10c€ per kwh, a striking achievement. Admittedly it’s Sunday, the weather is nice, and prices can be closer to 20c on weekdays and in cold spells, but even so. Brits and Australians pay up to three times as much. How come? A good Minister, Teresa Ribera, who has built a consensus round the energy transition, even while the political class remains bitterly divided over regionalism; a nearly complete phaseout of coal, with generous compensation and retraining schemes; a fast rollout of onshore wind, solar, and pumped hydro that on good days pushes out high-cost gas generation. There is no obvious limit to this last process, so future prices will settle closer to 10c than 20c. Spain is not doing quite so well on EV adoption, with currently ca.10% market share, against an EU average of 21% (Australia ca. 8%).
John Cadogan relays a horror story about a woman travelling in an EV car between Melbourne and Sydney. The advertised fully charged range of 500km was in reality 330km on the open road. Apparently this is standard for EV vehicles, which are highly inefficient on the open road. Of course the performance will only get worse as the EV vehicle ages- the batteries have very short lives.
Several hours were added to the trip due to the constant need to recharge, often done alone in the dark at charging stations with weak phone signals, which is too bad because you need a smart phone to use the charging stations!
Meanwhile one of the government’s much vaunted EV truck conversions blew up on the West Gate Bridge last week. As Cadogan points out, when these incredibly toxic monstrosities start blowing up in the Burnley tunnel and in underground car parks, we’ll be in deep doggy doo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLn_H-Ltkd0&t=856s