Another Monday Message Board. 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 
There seems to be some ambiguity in government economic management.
The old battle between microeconomic reform and macroeconomic stimulus (sorry that is now cost of living support) seems to have disappeared. Mention is made of productivity gains, supply chain adjustment and price gouging. But this is only in a lukewarm debate at best. As for tax reform that is buried so deep in the too hard basket that even Dr. Henry can’t extract it.
Canberra seems intent on letting the economic winds blow where they will. If supermarkets and petrol stations are price gouging, then they will make a lot of noise and do nothing. If bracket creep ( or fiscal drag) is warping the fairness and equity of income taxes then they will do up a quick fix, but leave any real reform well and truly alone. No mention is made of widening the tax base or notice taking of the population pyramid’s imminent inversion.
Reform has become a dirty word in Canberra. Both sides of politics talk a good fight then go back to their lounge chairs and gin and tonics. We have a bunch of faint hearted politicians, only interested in holding onto power and not interested in providing any real changes to Australian long term economic health.
This is a return to Menzies era politics where politicians did nothing and hoped for a lucky (always) unearned break. The only way to sum up this economic management style is with the old phrase “a bob each way”.
You get the politicians you deserve. And with every Tom, Dick and Harry screaming out “Not in my backyard” , faint hearted Canberra politicians are sitting on their hands.
Reform is messy but necessary for long term economic health. It’s the job of politicians to take initiatives and not overseas rest breaks. Harsh economic and demographic realities will soon catch out the Australian economy. Life rafts will then be in scarce supply on our ship of state.
Gregory J McKenzie,
Our politicians are captured by corporate and oligarchic capital. The owners of capital get the access, regulations, laws and decisions that they want in the great majority of cases. In return they fund the politicians and their parties. Actions which assist capital are rammed through rapidly. As you point out, re decisions to assist the people (workers, unemployed, pensioners, poor minorities etc.) the pollies will make a lot of noise and do nothing substantial. It’s all about prevarication, vacillation and delay.
Years ago I used to debate morality and human nature with a Calvinist theologian. He basically would say humans are fundamentally corrupt and irredeemable by their own efforts. I tend to agree now, though I think there is no supernatural redemption in the machinery. “Corrupt” is a judgemental word. Humans are basically playing out their atavistic evolved nature in a society and political economy system now lacking any communitarian morals or commitment.
The whole world system from axiology to ecology is too far gone. There’s no coming back from this. I’ve already accepted this and just live day to day existentially, trying to do least harm.
Today (Mar 14), the Climate Council of Australia posted a Media Release headlined UNWANTED ANNIVERSARY: 365 DAYS OF RECORD-BREAKING OCEAN TEMPERATURES, REEF FADING TO ‘SHADOW STATE’. It begins with:
Here’s a most concise and comprehensive essay on the messaging from mainstream climate science, which includes:
Ikonoclast
You are so right. I watched our timid prime minister and his treasurer on ABC TV news tonight. They both displayed a lack of moral fibre and ethical propriety. All the politicians in Canberra are self serving and lack moral substance. They hide behind that phrase
”acting on departmental advice”
as if they had no mind of their own. Everyone knows that they can keep sending for advice until they get the advice their wanted in the first place, It’s hypocritical to blame department advice for making the immoral decision.
The one instance in tonight’s news broadcast that appalled me the most was the statement the the federal government was going to “lend” over $500!million dollars to Australia’s richest person to establish a mine in the Northern Territory. This is a corruption of government action. Why does such a rich person need such a loan?
Ca
The single indicator that frightens me the most is this, “Global average ocean surface temperatures (are) “off the charts””. Every weather and ocean phenomenon that concerns humans in the short to mid term, and the long term, is downstream from this factor. High average surface temperatures drive extra energy moisture and energy being transferred to the atmosphere. This in turns drives extra intensity in heatwaves, storms, cyclones (and hurricanes and typhoons), tornadoes, rainfall events and flooding. In the longer term there is sea level rise which will be measured in meters.
The climate zone where I live (South East Qld. ) is palpably shifting already, from sub-tropical to tropical, changing our weather patterns and introducing new phenomena like “rain bombs”. To my mind this also sets up the question, “What are tropical zones becoming?” The only possible answer is “super-tropical”. Due to rising wet bulb temperatures, significant super-tropical areas will become marginal and then uninhabitable for humans,
The new Climate Council report ‘A Supercharged Climate: Rain Bombs, Flash Flooding and Destruction” explains how climate change is intensifying extreme rainfall and how the frequency of these events is likely to almost double with each degree of further global warming. (Avoiding links but people can look up the title.)
At the level of micro climate, I have seen shifts where I live and have lived for a little over 25 years. There is a probability, of course, that the shifts I am seeing are within the limits of standard weather variation within the “standard climate”. However, this probability is low, given the clear rise of ocean temperatures and the especially concerning and unprecedented spikes of 2023/2024. The higher probability is that this climate and climate zone is no longer “standard”.
The downstream effects are palpable and clear. Ability to work outdoors safely in summer is curtailed by the danger of heatstroke. Ability to work machinery safely on slopes is curtailed by numerous rainy days, slippery slopes and boggy sections. The exotic weed regime has totally changed, much for the worse. Exotic weeds more suited to the new conditions (including warmer, wetter winters and more winds all year) are gaining an extra competitive advantage over the more desirable regionally native plants which suit regional native wildlife.
Exotic animal pests are increasing across my area, most notably rats and cane toads but also some native species which are becoming more commensal with humans. The latter come to exist in unbalanced numbers and increase in nuisance value. On the other hand, the positive ecosystem of most native birds remains robust and they perform vital services, particularly the control of insects and spiders which remain in plentiful but not plague numbers.
One of the effects of the rain regime shift is increasing erosion and drainage problems and micro flooding (to possibly coin this term). These effects involve the householder and/or landholder in increasing expenses in installing new drainage (when the existing drainage was already extensive and robust enough for the worst thunderstorms and yet becomes inadequate to the requirements of the new rain bombs), new plantings to resist erosion and extra work and wear and tear on humans and machinery alike.
I could go on and on. Climate change weather novelties are already having multitudinous micro effects on the whole fabric of real assets and the ecosystem. These multitudinous micro effects (to use that term) are going to rapidly add up to massive macro effects throughout the human economy and ecosystem. The big, spectacular, annual or semi-annual events (regionally significant and catastrophic floods and fires) get the publicity and reportage. They are the pulse of “press and pulse”. But the multitudinous additive and even multiplicative micro effects are the press. The press is relentless now as I am sure many householders and even the parasitic landlords and rentiers are now finding out. People and systems are going to crack.
Scathing remarks in the AFR on 3 ”Rock Star” economists currently visiting Australia. One “end-of-capitalism-specialist”, one promoting a bigger public sector with “mission”-oriented objectives and one proponent of MMT:
“…the left has given up on the serious business of running the economy and making serious policy. But that happened back in the 1960s, when the working class abandoned the traditional left in favour of affluence, and turned to culture war identity politics instead. Economics, as our visiting economists confirm, is now the entertainment division of the revolution. They have proved it’s not capitalism that’s dead, it’s Marxism and its followers.”
There is a podcast and, sorry, no, I cannot copy the whole paywalled article:
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/rock-star-economists-are-prophets-with-nothing-to-say-20240312-p5fbno
Harry Clarke
This kind of mocking triumphalism (in the AFR) is pride before the fall. The left (liberal left, Marxist or Marxian left) is lost and defeated. That is certainly true. But neoliberal capitalism has won a Pyrrhic victory. They have comprehensively defeated the left but have also doomed the environment and the fabric of their own societies to collapse.
A salient point, but one which probably doesn’t enable us to save anything much, is that both the capitalists and the Marxists are comprehensively wrong. They don’t understand what our economy really is or how it works. The Capital as Power theorists have developed a scientifically defensible analysis of the system. But people mired in religion or ideology cannot absorb advances in science which refute their shibboleths.
I am not saying I agree with or am comfortable with CasP theory in its entirety. It is cutting edge and unlikely to be comprehensively correct in all details. But its analysis of fundamentals is scientifically valid which is not something we can say about classical and neoclassical economic theory or even of Keynesian and neo or New Keynesian theories.
But I think it is signally interesting that I can’t get economists, even those I term enlightened economists, to read CasP. The minds of all orthodox economists have closed in within their ideologically conditioned discipline which is theoretically sundered (in at least some important respects) from a very complex empirical reality.
If these sort of statements, or some of my snarks from frustration, get me banned from this blog (it always possible to exceed toleration) then so be it. I would accept the ban of course.
Ikonoclast.
Ikonoclast: – “The single indicator that frightens me the most is this, “Global average ocean surface temperatures (are) “off the charts””.“
…and that will drive sea ice loss, thus reducing albedo, leading to accelerating surface air temperature increases in the polar regions and thus accelerate ice sheet loss.
In the YouTube video titled Greenland: Ice Loss Accelerating, published 8 Mar 2024, duration 0:25:33, Peter Wadhams, Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University and Climate Scientist, Paul Beckwith describe what is happening on this sensitive continent. The latest research shows that Greenland’s glaciers are shrinking at seven times the rate of just a few years ago, an average of 30 million tonnes an hour. Paul Beckwith says from time interval 0:03:58:
“We have very good data on measuring the mass of both Greenland and Antarctica; [from] the gravity anomaly satellites ah, flying in tandem, and we’ve seen melt rates at least doubling every, what, seven to ten years typically, both for Greenland and also for Antarctica. And, ah, we’re still focussed mostly on the Northern Hemisphere, but with all that missing Antarctic sea ice and warming water, people are very concerned also with the Antarctic ah, glacier melt, and they’re tied together because if melt rates greatly increase at one pole, you know, the rising sea level can lift up floating ice shelves and, and cause accelerated melting at the other pole. So, there’s a connection, of course, between them. People are going to be very surprised, I think, at the, at the accelerated growth of sea level rise, in the next ah, you know, decade, decade or two, let alone…”
Host Dale Walkonen interrupted from time interval 0:04:54:
“What, what are we actually looking at? I mean, if all of Greenland melted, it would be 25 feet of sea level rise, according to what I’ve read. What, what is it likely to be within the next… Are we likely to see something significant within the next couple of decades?”
Paul Beckwith responded from time interval 0:05:09:
“Well there, the jury’s out on that. We don’t know for sure, but ah, I mean Hansen has said in the past, ah, he wouldn’t be surprised if we had five metres of sea level rise by 2100. He said that a number of years ago when the IPCC models were showing about ah, half a metre.”
Host Dale Walkonen interrupted from time interval 0:05:28:
“Yeah, that of course is James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, um, who testified before Congress famously and warned everybody years ago and has now written several papers that are quite alarming!”
Paul Beckwith responded from time interval 0:05:40:
“Right. You know, it’s a work in progress. I mean, the rates are definitely accelerating, and of course we’re seeing a huge acceleration in global average temperatures. We’re seeing a huge acceleration in ocean water heating, so all of these things um, are, mean, mean that the sea level rise rates will have to, to be revised continuously, um, and ah, you know, I, I fully expect ah, you know, I think Hansen’s probably underestimating with his five metres by 2100.”
With Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet melt rates apparently doubling “seven to ten years … typically”, then that suggests the current sea level rise (SLR) rate of 4.5 mm per year observed over the period 2013–2021, per AR6 WG1, is likely to accelerate. I did a calculation for the rate of SLR for 7- & 10-year doubling rate acceleration scenarios with a starting point of 4.5 mm/y in 2024:
Year _ _ _ _ 7-year _ _ 10-year
2024 _ _ _ 4.5 mm/y _ 4.5 mm/y
2025 _ _ _ 5.0 _ _ _ _ _ 4.8
2030 _ _ _ 8.2 _ _ _ _ _ 6.8
2035 _ _ 13.4 _ _ _ _ _ 9.6
2040 _ _ 21.9 _ _ _ _ 13.6
2045 _ _ 36.0 _ _ _ _ 19.3
2050 _ _ 59.1 _ _ _ _ 27.3
2055 _ _ 96.9 _ _ _ _ 38.6
2060 _ 159.0 _ _ _ _ 54.6
2065 _ 260.8 _ _ _ _ 77.2
2070 _ 428.0 _ _ _ 109.1
That suggests the global mean SL, relative to today’s (year-2024) levels, may perhaps be of the order of:
So potentially, multi-metre SLR is possible well before year-2075 for both the 7- and 10-year doubling time acceleration scenarios, and 5 m SLR before 2100 is easily plausible.
NOAA’s Feb 2022 report on SLR projects between 0.15 to 0.43 m by 2050, relative to a year-2000 baseline (see Table 2.3).
Who’s planning for this order of magnitude of SLR?