Category: Environment

Cut your energy bills in half

John Quiggin46 Comments

A newspaper story I once read (almost certainly apocryphal) claimed that advertisement to this effect asked for a small payment in return for a guaranteed method of cutting energy bills in half. If you paid up, you received, by return mail, a pair of scissors.

A more serious version of this question occurred to me in relation to yet another dispute about the allegedly special character of energy as a commodity. It occurred to me to ask the following question: suppose that my family and I had to reduce my personal energy consumption, immediately and permanently by 50 per cent. How feasible would it be, and how much worse off would we be? So, assuming we attempted it evenly across the board, this would mean

* Reducing car travel by 50 per cent, until we could get a more fuel-efficient car, or share rides
* Reducing lighting by 50 per cent, until we could get more energy-efficient lightbulbs
* Reducing air travel by 50 per cent, until airlines introduced more fuel-efficient planes
* Reducing use of airconditioning and central heating by 50 per cent, either by turning it off half the time or by adjusting thermostats
* Reducing use of existing consumer durables and purchase of new ones by 50 per cent, until substitutes with less lifecycle energy use became available

To make it a bit tougher, we might try to achieve bigger reductions in these areas, to offset various forms of indirect energy use, such as the energy used in food production.

My assessment is that this would be very difficult. But do some comparisons, and it looks easy.

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Crowdsourcing the links between climate and tobacco hackery

John Quiggin52 Comments

In this very silly hit piece in the Oz, Graham Young says that I “imply” that many climate delusionists are (or were) tobacco hacks. His wording in turn implies that they aren’t or might not be. Of course this is a simple question of fact, well documented in Naomi Oreskes Merchants of Doubt. But, as a fun exercise, I thought readers might be interested in a “Six degrees” crowdsourcing exercise for the leading individual and institutional advocates of climate delusion. Candidates score

1. If took tobacco money or public anti-science position on tobacco (denying risks of active or passive smoking)
2. (a) Direct link (co-authorship of, or institutional affiliation for, climate delusionist pieces) to person or institution in group 1, or advocacy of tobacco interests on issues like advertising, plain labelling etc
3. Direct link to group 2

etc.

Bonus points for

(a) anyone who can make a clear case for a climate delusionist with a score of 4 or above
(b) first anti-science commenter to claim “ad hominem”, “guilt by association” etc. Working for, or with criminals like the tobacco lobby, is indeed a guilty association. Those who have inadvertently entangled themselves with links to the tobacco lobby can always repudiate them.

Believing Barry O’Farrell could cost you “up to” 100 IQ points

John Quiggin25 Comments

The NSW government has released a a frothing at the mouth press release claiming that a carbon price will devastate the economy. As Mary McCarthy would say, every single word in it is a lie, including “a” and “the”. Top billing has to go to that old favorite of shonky advertisers “up to”, as in a carbon price will ” force up electricity prices for NSW households by up to $498 a year.” The Commonwealth Treasury modelling, which I’ve checked, gives an average cost increase of $3.30 or about $170 a year.

Although the analysis is attributed to NSW Treasury, they apparently weren’t hackish enough for the government, which had to go to Frontier Economics to get the answers they wanted. I’m waiting to see the report, but in the meantime, my reactions to the press statement are over the fold

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Benefits of hindsight

John Quiggin12 Comments

We’ve just had the first report from the inquiry into the floods at the beginning of the year in Brisbane and other parts of Queensland. The main recommendations are pretty close to what I put forward a few days after the Brisbane flood.

That just reflects the fact that it was immediately obvious, in hindsight, what changes needed to made. It would have been more impressive to get it right in advance. In this context, I feel some sympathy for the minister at the time, Stephen Robertson. As far as I can see, he was the only person to suggest lowering dam levels, but his requests for a response went nowhere with the bureaucracy. As a result, he got an adverse mention in the report. But if he had stuck to the rulebook, I doubt that anyone would have noticed.

Yet more Monckton

John Quiggin39 Comments

The House of Lords has taken ‘unprecedented’ action to stop Lord Monckton claiming that he is a member (his closest approach was receiving zero votes in an election among hereditary peers). That’s typically the opening lie in a Monckton presentation that misrepresents everything from the United Nations to the laws of arithmetic. It’s hard to imagine how many cease and desist letters would be required to stop all the falsehoods, or what would be left of his presentation if they were removed[1].

But, as I said previously, the real point here relates to the Australian political right, who have embraced Monckton with universal (if sometimes feigned) enthusiasm. And not just Monckton, but a long string of conpsiracy theorists, charlatans and cranks, who keep on repeating the same lies despite being repeatedly refuted (Ian Plimer on volcanoes can stand in for a multitude of examples).

As I said previously, it’s hard to tell who is most blameworthy here. Is it the’crazy uncles’ represented by people like Nick Minchin and encompassing the majority of conservative supporters, who actually believe this stuff, the weathervanes like Tony Abbott who will happily say 2+2 = 4,5 or 73 according to what their listeners want to hear, or supposedly serious conservatives/liberals who know it’s nonsense but keep their mouths shut.

In the short term, and aided by some spectacular own goals on the Labor side, this intellectual catastrophe hasn’t had any political costs for the right. But that won’t be true forever. And for any intelligent person of conservative inclinations, the knowledge that political activity on their preferred side requires (at a minimum) tacit acquiescence in this kind of thing must be pretty appalling.

fn1. Indeed, bearing in mind Mary McCarthy’s famous remark about Lillian Hellman, it’s hard to imagine that even prepositions and conjunctions would remain.

Greenpeace, an enemy of science

John Quiggin139 Comments

Tim Lambert comments on Greenpeace sabotage of a CSIRO experiment on GM crops. Sadly, Greenpeace has become an openly anti-science organisation.

I agree with everything Tim says, but I’d add something more on the politics of this action. This kind of criminal vandalism, in the “right” cause, appeals to the juvenile instincts that nearly all of us retain to some extent, but it has repeatedly proved disastrous for the left, and the environmental movement. It’s worth comparing this kind of action to civil disobedience protests, where people put themselves on the line and openly invite arrest. If these guys had any desire to promote genuine debate they would turn themselves in and defend their actions in open court.

Given the embrace of anti-science and anti-rational views by the political right, it is important that the left and the environmental movement should dissociate themselves entirely from this kind of action. It will be a long time before Greenpeace can regain my support, if they ever do.

Carbon tax – instant reax

John Quiggin48 Comments

The proposed carbon tax is a substantial improvement on the heavily compromised emissions trading scheme agreed between the Rudd government and the Opposition under Malcolm Turnbull. Although there is substantial compensation for emissions-intensive industry it is temporary and based on historic emissions level, so that the incentive to reduce emissions is not compromised. The design of the compensation package for households is also welcome.

The government has avoided the temptation to pretend that everyone will be better off, and has taken the reasonable position that high income households do not need to be compensated for the introduction of necessary reforms. This has permitted the very welcome measure of raising the income tax threshold and thereby taking more than a million low-income workers out of the income tax system.

While the primary focus of the package is, correctly, on the imposition of a price on carbon emissions, there are a range of supporting measures designed to encourage energy efficiency and innovation. On the whole, these seem more carefully designed than the measures introduced under previous governments.

Response to Greg Sheridan

John Quiggin21 Comments

Greg Sheridan was upset about my piece in the Fin, attacking his claim that the effects of Australian action on climate change will “will have an impact on the global environment so tiny it will be unmeasurable.” I’ll respond to the details of his objections over the fold, but let’s first tackle the substantive question. Australia is currently responsible for a about 2 per cent of global emissions. Under business as usual projections, our emissions were expected to grow by 20 to 30 per cent between 2000 and 2020. If we achieve the target of 5 per cent below 2000 emission, that implies a reduction of 25 per cent relative to business as usual, 0.5 per cent of global emissions. That’s about 1 per cent of what is needed if the world is to cut total emissions by 50 per cent over the next couple of decades, as is necessary in a stabilisation scenario.

That’s a small step that is not going to solve the problem, but neither is it “so tiny as to be immeasurable”. In fact, it’s pretty typical of Australia’s weight in international affairs – small relative to the big players like the US and China, but large relative to our share of world population. As a comparison, Australia currently has about 1500 troops in Afghanistan, out of a total (ISAF and Afghan army) force of over 150 000. Would Sheridan want to argue that, since our troops are less than 1 per cent of the total, their effects are so immeasurably small that we might as well do nothing[1]. Well, no. It appears that Australia is immeasurably tiny only when we are doing things US Republicans don’t like.

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