There’s been a striking divide in reactions to the government’s changes to the ETS, with most of the major environmental groups supporting it, while the Greens (and most commenters here) seeing only negatives. The headline change (a one-year delay in the start date) is so minor that it’s not worth discussing, but it seems to have set the tone for a lot of responses. And some responses have taken it for granted that the government is acting in bad faith, but on that assumption, there is no point in arguing the specifics of policy.

Coming to substantive issues, a major complaint appears to be that the unconditional target of a 5 per cent reduction is not enough. Those making this complaint seem to me to be influenced by an error that’s the mirror-image of the doolittle-delay claim that, since Australia only accounts for 2 per cent of global emissions, we may as well do nothing.

The element of truth in the doolittle-delay line is that, in the absence of a global agreement, the planet is done for. That means that, when offering a conditional and an unconditional target, the crucial requirement for a defensible policy is a conditional target consistent with a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The unconditional target is important only insofar as it helps to achieve such an agreement, and a higher unconditional target is not necessarily a better one.

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Media coverage of Rudd’s announced changes in the ETS scheme has focused on the one-year delay in the starting date. But the big news is that the government will now offer emissions reduction target to up to 25 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020, if an international agreement is made later this year in Denmark to keep global emissions under 450 parts per million.

This is significant good news. It’s obviously necessary to look at the fine print, but a 25 per cent reduction would be consistent with a global contract and converge agreement which could achieve climate stabilization. In the context of such a commitment, a delay in the start date for the scheme (inevitable in any case given the situation in the Senate) is a small price to pay, as is the temporary cap on permit prices.

Also, the government seems to have responded to criticisms about the ineffectiveness of voluntary action

Mr Rudd has also announced that households and businesses will be able to contribute to cutting Australia’s emissions through an Australian Carbon Trust comprising of an energy efficiency trust and an energy efficiency savings pledge fund.

Households would be able to calculate their energy use and then make donations to fund which would then buy and cancel carbon permits.

The scheme may not be perfect, but, on the face of it, the changes are sufficient for me to conclude that the Greens ought to be backing it, and seeking some further improvements, rather than holding out in the name of purity.

For Your Consideration divx

I’ve been following discussions of solar energy on-and-off for quite a while, and it has always seemed as if it would be quite a long time, even assuming an emissions trading scheme or carbon tax, before solar photovoltaics could be a cost-competitive source of electricity without special support such as capital subsidies or feed-in tariffs set above market prices.

But looking at the issue again today, I’m finding lots of claims that this “grid parity” will be achieved in the next few years, and even one company, First Solar, that claims to be already at grid parity with a 12 MW plant in Nevada completed last year . Obviously, Nevada is a particularly favorable location, and there is plenty of room for judgement in cost estimates. Still, looking at a lot of different reports, it seems clear that, with a carbon price of say $50/tonne (about 5 cents/kwh for black coal and 7 cents/kwh for brown coal), solar will be cost-competitive with coal for most places in Australia without any need for fundamental technical improvements.
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The Oz has published another response to my piece in the Fin, this time from Christopher Pearson. Unlike with William Kininmonth, I can’t complain about misquotation: Pearson gives extensive and fairly representative quotes from the article.

Pearson cites my observation that conservative political activists have constructed a parallel intellectual universe and goes on to say

This is precisely the kind of analysis I apply when trying to explain what sociologists call the plausibility structures that serve to underpin the twilight world of the warmists. Quiggin is fighting fire with fire, in much the same way that Marxist and Christian apologists used to try and encompass and thus explain away one another’s world views

Analytically, this is about right. Parallelism is a symmetric relationship, so Pearson’s view of my intellectual universe (and that of, among others, the US National Academy of Science, the Royal Society, NOAA, CSIRO and well over 95 per cent of active climate scientists) is much the same as my view of his (where these roles are filled by bodies like, among others, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Lavoisier Group, and experts such as those on Senator Inhofe’s list of 650-odd dissenters

– note the presence of such eminent Australian scientists as Louis Hissink and Alan Moran of the IPA).

I’ve always managed to maintain civil terms of debate with Pearson, and I hope to continue that, but of course discussions between parallel universes tend not to result in much in the way of serious engagement. I will however, restate my point that the problems with the parallel universe go well beyond climate change. An example is the way Pearson fell for the bogus claim that environmentalists had banned the antimalarial use of DDT, a claim propagated by now-discredited tobacco industry hack Stephen Milloy, and circulated through the parallelosphere by such authorities as Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Crichton. I had a to at it here and parasitologist Alan Lymbery did a thorough demolition here

. Pearson didn’t AFAIK revisit the DDT myth (and even refers to it as a human health hazard here), but neither has he learned any lessons about the reliability of sources like Lomborg and Crichton.

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As I hinted in my post on the Senate Committee on Emissions Trading, Senator Ron Boswell went pretty much ballistic when I said that people who rejected the science of climate change had nothing useful to contribute to the debate. I was a bit surprised at his vehemence, but it turns out there was a good reason. Along with Barnaby Joyce, Boswell is launching Ian Plimer’s latest contribution to the delusionist literature
[1].

Comments from me, David Karoly, Ian Lowe and Ben McNeil .

To restate the conclusion of my last Fin column,

Until conservatives adopt a reality-based approach to climate change, as they have done in Europe and the UK, they cannot be taken seriously as an alternative government.

fn1. I don’t think anyone has yet had the patience to work through and identify all the errors in this deplorable work, but Tim Lambert has identified a couple of dozen Made of Honor hd . For anyone willing to be convinced, the fact that Plimer includes a graph from Martin Durkin’s ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’ which was so obviously wrong that even Durkin had to withdraw it is a pretty good measure of the level of scholarship Plimer has devoted to this.

The Senate Committee of Inquiry into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme held hearings in Brisbane today, and I gave evidence, based on the submission I posted a while back. As always, an interesting experience. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for the whole event, but the witness before me (operator of a meat processing plant) made the interesting point that, for grass-fed cattle, the methane emissions about which we have heard so much are offset by the carbon sequestration associated with eating grass, which then regrows.

The hearing went pretty well, though there was a minor blowup with Ron Boswell when I said something scathing about the fact that those who rejected the science were had been taken seriously in Australia far longer than in the UK or Europe. None of the other conservative party Senators bit on this one (not that it was meant as a provocation, just a factual observation).

The continuing influence of delusional thinking, when combined with the need to deny any such influence whenever pressed on it, was a big problem for Nelson, continues to be a big one for Turnbull. And given the strength of delusionist defence mechanisms (on view in the thread regarding the fraudulent Climate Coalition) it’s hard to see how it’s going to be resolved any time soon. Unfortunately, Labor is not 100 per cent free of these types, and their influence on policy outcomes, while greatly reduced, remains both real and damaging.

Update In comments, Barry Brook and others offer a pretty complete demolition of the grass sequestration argument. By the time we have eaten the cows there is no net sequestration to offset the methane emissions.

Back in the 1990s, before the Internet created the self-sustaining parallel universe now inhabited by Republicans and their sympathisers, the task of casting doubt on climate science fell to a group of thinktanks and lobby groups. The most active was the Global Climate Coalition, funded by an array of industry groups, notably including motor and oil companies. Since climate delusions never die, a large number of the factoids now circulating among those who absurdly refer to themselves as “skeptics” can be traced back to the GCC and its FUD machine.

As reported by the New York Times, a recent court case allows us a peek behind the curtain at the (now-disbanded GCC). It turns out that even as the Global Climate Coalition was promoting delusional claims, its own scientists were advising that they would not stand up to scrutiny.

You might think that a chapter-and-verse demonstration of how the trick was performed might shock some self-styled “sceptics” into the realisation that they had displayed credulous gullibility. But at this point delusionists are like believers in alien-generated crop circles. It doesn’t matter if the tricksters who made the circles confess, and even show how it was done. As George Bush might have said of these guys “Fool them once, and they stay fooled”.

The US Environmental Protection Authority has announced that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are a threat to public health, which opens the way for them to be regulated under the Clean Air Act, a measure once promised by George Bush as a presidential candidate but ferociously resisted by his administration.

As Brad Plumer explains here, the regulations will transform the Congressional debate over bills to introduce a national cap-and-trade system. In the absence of EPA regulations, and assuming continuation of current practices regarding the filibuster, the Republicans in the Senate could block any action as long as they could muster 41 votes (and of course, ratification of a treaty like Kyoto requires 66 out of 100 votes). But now the effect of a filibuster will be to leave the EPA to deal with the issue by regulation, which might include establishment of emissions trading schemes, as well as technological mandates to adopt best practice technology. Almost certainly, some Senate Republicans will prefer a deal where they get to protect some favored interests to a system of regulation over which they have no say.

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Here’s my submission to the Senate Select Committee on Climate Policy. It was a bit of a rush job, given competing pressures like the Global Financial Crisis and the continuing (related) problems of the Murray-Darling. Comments appreciated.

Thanks to a combination of continued drought and the long-term increase in temperatures, exacerbated by land-use changes such as increased use of farm dams, inflows to the Murray-Darling system have hit a new record low

It will take quite a few years of above-average rainfall to restore the system to anything like the pre-drought situation and there is, so far, no suggestion that we are going to see this. On the contrary, the reverse is more likely, both in the short run and the long run.

A lot of my work with the Risk and Sustainable Management Group deals with adaptation to climate change in the Basin. There’s quite a bit of scope for this, but if inflows fall as far as the most likely climate scenarios project over the next century, irrigated agriculture will cease to be feasible.