My opinion columns at the Fin appear to have emerged from behind the paywall. I guess that says they aren’t vital enough that people will pay to read them (especially since they can get much the same opinions here) but maybe that having this material available will attract readers to the Fin site and sell advertising. Anyway, here’s my latest

The long-awaited White Paper version of the government’s emissions trading scheme is out. I’ve been too disheartened to read anything more than the summary so far. The target of a 5 per cent reduction on 2000 emissions by 2020 seems designed to secure the support of the Opposition, which will probably not be forthcoming anyway. That’s about the only defence that could be made for it.

The government’s main argument in favour of such a weak target is based on Australia’s relatively high rate of population growth. I have no objection to per capita, rather than national, emissions targets in the context of a contract-and-converge agreement leading ultimately to a uniform global allowance per person. But if you wanted to argue that way, the fact that Australia has one of the highest emission levels per person in the world means that our (interim and final) reduction targets must be more stringent than those of other countries.

At this point, the only real hope is that the Obama Administration will take a strong line on the issue. If it does, then the US-EU combination will dragoon recalcitrants like Australia into a sustainable agreement whatever Rudd and Turnbull might say or do about it.

Quite a few months ago now I took part in a session on water at the Melbourne Writers Festival, where I got to meet Gwynne Dyer, whose work on international politics I’ve been reading for many decades and also Maude Barlow from Canada and Paul Sinclair of ACF. Peter Mares chaired the session and subsequently broadcast it on The National Interest. You can read the transcript here. There was a lot of agreement but also some fairly sharp disagreement: Maude Barlow took a localist line on food production while I stressed the need for Australia to remain an exporter of food (the audience tended to agree with Maude).

The Centre for Policy Development, based in Sydney, runs a series called “Common Ground” in which people who might be expected to be opposed (for example, because of their party-political alignment) explore issues where they have some views in common. On Wed 26 November, they’ll have Bob Carr and Pru Goward on climate change.

Venue is Customs House, at 5:30 for 6

You can register to attend online, or RSVP by email to contact@cpd.org.au.

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I’ve been finding it hard to concentrate on the future of the planet for the last week or so, what with the nationalisation of vast segments of the financial sector, the disappearance of all four remaining US investment banks, the trillion dollar bailout and so on. But I’m going to be presenting a lecture for UQ research week on Wednesday night, entitled “Climate Change and the Murray Darling Basin”. The news isn’t good but there is still some hope if we act swiftly and sensibly. Perhaps the other speaker will have something more solidly positive to tell us. He’s Professor Paul Burn Federation Fellow, School of Molecular & Microbial Sciences talking on ‘Can Light Solve the Energy Crisis?’

I’m planning a full-length post on Garnaut, but I thought I’d do a quick check on what would be involved in meeting the target of a 10 per cent reduction in emissions between 2000 and 2020. My guess is that the increase in oil prices we’ve already seen will be enough to bring consumption of petrol and diesel back to the 2000 level, and that other sectors like agriculture will be roughly stable. That means that most of the reduction will have to be found in energy generation.

My rough estimate is that the use of brown coal in energy generation contributes around 10 per cent of total emissions (Update:After I revised my estimate to 15 per cent, reader Chris Short pointed me to a section of Greenhouse Gas Inventory I’d missed, which gives brown coal a 30 per cent share of electricity’s 34 per cent of emissions, so 10 per cent was right ), so, as a first approximation, the Garnaut target could be met shutting down the brown coal sector and replacing it with enough renewables to cover the brown coal share of existing electricity, and any growth in final consumption. Consumption growth would be constrained both by increasing prices and by conservation measures.

That would certainly require a substantial adjustment assistance program in the Latrobe valley and similar locations. We’ve done this kind of thing before, for example, with the end of the steel industry in Newcastle, sometimes well and sometimes poorly.

My guess is that the actual outcome would involve keeping some brown coal stations, with drying technology that reduces emissions to a level comparable with black coal, and some expansion of gas-fired power stations, offset by a combination of domestic offset measures and purchases of international offsets. The Garnaut cost estimates of around 1 per cent of GDP look pretty plausible for this. This story actually suggests a lower value, since $35 billion over 10 years is around 0.3 per cent of GDP.

I spent most of yesterday at a symposium organised by the Australian Institute of Agricultural Science and Technology. A lot of topics were discussed, but one that interested me was methane, mainly that emitted from both ends of ruminants such as cows.

There’s plenty to to say about this, but I’m just going to repeat one point that I made briefly and that subsequent speakers like Snow Barlow from Melbourne expanded on. Methane belched or farted by a cow is not just a greenhouse gas, it’s nutrition wasted by the digestive process. So, if we can find ways to reduce methane emissions, they should also increase the productivity of agriculture.

That’s not to say that there are $50 bills lying in every cowpat, waiting to be picked up. If there were a cheap and easy way of improving digestion it would have been found by now. But there’s certainly a potential for increased output to offset the costs of finding, developing and implementing ways of reducing methane emissions, for example by making cows fart like kangaroos

As an illustration of the complexities, some other research reported at the symposium showed that having more CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the growth of some tropical grasses (this was a bit of a surprise because these are C4 plants, generally thought to benefit less from this effect), but will reduce the nutrient quality which makes digestion more difficult and therefore tends to increase methane emissions. For any “Greening Earth’ fans out there, I should point out that, as in previous work, studies reported at the symposium found that adverse effects of higher temperatures and more variable rainfall will outweigh any net benefits of CO2 fertilisation

Here’s my presentationMosquito the Rapist aka Bloodlust on dvd

I haven’t really overcome my backlog, but I am going to appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Friday and Saturday this week, talking about blogging and water, so it seemed like a good idea to run a blog post about water.

My piece in the Fin a couple of weeks ago appeared simultaneously with the news that the government would accelerate its buyback of water, definitely a step in the right direction. It’s become fashionable to suggest that the government is all review and no action, but compared to the decade of paralysis we saw from the last lot, culminating in the farcical National Water Plan, the pace of change is amazing.

Still, the situation bequeathed by Howard (and, it must be said, Turnbull) is truly dire

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