Ken Parish has an interesting post on “a new American process that is believed could halve the cost of producing ethanol”. If it pans out, this could provide one route to meeting our Kyoto commitments, which the government says it will do even without ratification. (Ken seems to suggest that ethanol is an alternative to Kyoto, but I don’t follow this.)
Unfortunately, I have been following alternative fuels for a long time, and, as with large-scale solar electricity or nuclear fusion, cost-effective ethanol is one of those things that always seems to be just around the corner. At least for the next twenty years, my guess is that we’ll be focusing on more prosaic approaches such as
(a) improving energy efficiency across a wide range of activities
(b) halting and reversing tree-clearing
(c) substituting gas for coal
(d) cutting down on some energy-intensive activities
I haven’t mentioned nuclear fission yet. The capital costs of nuclear fission plants are so great that only a hefty carbon tax would make them profitable, and the price responses to such a tax (reduced usage) would be sufficient to meet not only Kyoto targets, but probably the next few rounds as well. (Of course, you can cut costs by leaving out all that expensive shielding as the Russians did, but we know what happened there).
Ken also mentions a study by ABARE which I disregarded in reporting Warwick McKibbin’s work on Kyoto. When I get time, I will put up a detailed post explaining why I don’t think ABARE’s work on this issue deserves much weight.

Over the years, I’ve often had dealings with Gerry Jackson and his group at the The New Australian, a group notable, even by blogosphere standards, for a vitriolic style and casual disregard for the facts. At one time, I was even willing to respond to their attacks on me, and wrote responses, which, to Jackson’s credit, he published on his site. I also sparred with Aaron Oakley in the pages of Margo Kingston’s Webdiary. More recently, I concluded that it was a waste of time talking to them, and decided to ignore future attacks
My position has hardened since the publication of my recent post explaining why, among the many dictators that infest the world, I personally loathe Augusto Pinochet and the late Leonid Brezhnev more than others. This elicited a stream of attacks from the New Australian group, and led me to this sickening link, where Jackson defends the terrorist assassination (the US State Department’s assessment, not mine) of exiled Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976.
In some sense, all murders are equally evil, but there’s something particularly repugnant about a government pursuing its enemies into foreign countries and murdering them. The first to do this on a big scale was Stalin, and Jackson’s justification for the murder is straight out of the Stalin school of falsification – Letelier, he says, was a KGB agent. Even if true, this would not of course justify murder, but as far as I can determine, Jackson’s only source for this accusation is one William F. Jasper a writer for a journal called The New American (even loonier than The New Australian), who, among other things, accuses Bill Clinton and most of his administration of being terrorist sympathisers.
In an unsolicited (but apparently widely distributed) email, Jackson claims his position is justified because I “adamantly refused to condemn Castro”. Given that this fight started with my post condemning Castro’s patron and paymaster Brezhnev, this is bizarre (did Jackson expect me to list all the dictators of the last century and condemn them individually?), but, for the record, I condemn all dictators, Communist and otherwise, including Castro.
As I said in the original post, I have a visceral loathing for Pinochet and those who seek to justify his murderous regime. Jackson will no doubt have his say on his own site, but I will have no further dealings with him or those associated with him.

Richard Butler who can scarcely be accused of being anti-American or soft on Saddam, gives an excellent defence of multilateralism and the UN

Continuing on Trollope’s Palliser novels, I’m now reading Can You Forgive Her?. I’ve also just got a beautiful Folio Society edition of the Essays of Francis Bacon. Finally, I’m rereading Hayek and Mill with the intention of going more thoroughly into debate that’s electrified this corner of the blogosphere.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the economics of the Kyoto Protocol. Some time ago, the government commissioned Warwick McKibbin, who’s a leading critic of Kyoto, to model the effects. The results he found are pretty striking. Whether Australia ratifies or not, there’ll be a negative impact on the coal industry because other countries will import less. But given that other countries have ratified, McKibbin finds that, at least until 2010, Australia is better off ratifying Kyoto and implementing emission-reduction measures than staying out. The gain is reversed by 2020, but the current agreement calls for new targets to be agreed and implemented by 2012, encompassing more countries. The other striking feature is how small the numbers are -the benefit of staying out in 2020 is 0.2 per cent of GDP or about $1 billion per year. Although I disagree with Warwick’s policy position on Kyoto, I compliment him for keeping his independence as a modeller. The government clearly didn’t like his results one bit.

You can get the full paper in PDF form here. To make things a bit easier, I’ve appended the crucial table from McKibbin’s paper and a press release from Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute
All of this reminds me that I heard a few days ago that the anti-Kyoto economists’ petition organised by Alex Robson, of which McKibbin was a leading signatory, was about to be released. But I didn’t see anything in the papers, and there’s nothing on Alex’s weblog. What’s the story?

Table 7: Summary of Impacts on Australia 2010 to 2020
2010 2015 2020
Australia in Kyoto without measures -0.41 -0.58 -0.67
Australia in Kyoto with measures -0.33 -0.47 -0.51
Australia not in Kyoto -0.40 -0.38 -0.30

News release
Contact Clive Hamilton 02 6249 6221 0413 993 223
Government humiliated by new economic
modelling of Kyoto
New modelling just released by the Federal Government concludes that the economic cost of the Kyoto Protocol will be higher if Australia does not ratify the treaty than if it joins other countries in global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Australia Institute.
The results demolish any remaining rationale for Australia’s continued refusal to sign up to the treaty, as the Howard Government has claimed consistently that it is not in Australia’s economic interests to do so.
The Government commissioned the new modelling after the Marrakech climate change conference last November. But Environment Minister David Kemp refused to release the results of the modelling for five months. It has now released the results after the Johannesburg Summit where Australia was vigorously attacked for refusing
to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.
The modelling, by ANU economist Warwick McKibbin, concludes that by 2010 Australia’s GNP will decline by 0.40% if Australia stays out of the Kyoto Protocol, but will decline by only 0.33% if Australia ratifies. In his media statement accompanying the release of the modelling, Minister Kemp distanced the Government from the new evidence, claiming the work it commissioned only addresses ‘a limited set of the issues’.
“For years the Government has backed its anti-Kyoto stance by referring to the results of economic models,” said Institute Executive Director Dr Clive Hamilton. “Now that the models conclude that we would be better off ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the Government has run a mile from it.”
“No wonder the Government chose to release this new modelling at 6 o’clock on at Friday night”, said Dr Hamilton.

I pointed out a little while ago the falsity of Mark Steyn’s claim that only English-speaking countries were on the Allied side in both World Wars and the Cold War. In addition to France and Belgium, Greece joined the Allied side in 1917 (same year as the US) and was on the Allied side in World War II and the Cold War.
Leaving aside Steyn’s factual errors, I’d argue that World War I was a pointless bloodbath and award the full score only to the handful of countries that managed to stay neutral in WWI, while joining the right side in WWII and the Cold War. The winners on this count are the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark. My discussion with Jason Soon in the comments section raised the point that Denmark also managed to rescue nearly its entire Jewish population from the Nazis. The outcome in the Netherlands was far bleaker, but, according to the Simon Wiesenthal centre, the Netherlands had the highest proportion of ‘righteous gentiles’ (those who risked their lives to save Jews).
Every country has good and bad in its history. The kind of triumphalism that characterises Steyn’s journalism rests on denying this basic fact with respect to the countries he favors. This fundamental falsehood gives rise to the specific falsehoods and distortions that infect nearly everything he writes.
Update: As Ken Parish points out, Steyn sinks to a new low in his latest column, retailing absurd urban myths that Muslim schoolchildren in New York knew about the impending attacks, then claiming an elite media conspiracy to suppress these myths in the interests of ethnic harmony. Actually ‘urban myth’ isn’t quite right, since Steyn’s source, a journalist named Shapiro, gives the name of a schoolteacher who allegedly remembered the statement a week later. As this this site shows, dozens of stories of this kind, many with more convincing details, floated about in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Virtually all have disappeared for lack of any substance. It’s obvious by now that Al-Qaeda are a thoroughly professional group of killers and that any claim that their plans were leaked to the entire Muslim community (Steyn-Shapiro’s insinuation) or were well-known by Jews (the ‘Arab street’ version) is racist nonsense.
Further update: Don Arthur joins the fray, pointing out plagiarism and inaccuracy in Steyn’s reporting of events in Norway. (Janet Albrechtsen, another serial offender in this respect, is also named).

Yet further update: The ever-reliable Snopes.com Urban Legends Reference Pagespoint out the obvious explanation for this and other stories where ‘predictions’ of dramatic events are ‘recalled’ after the event. They focus on an almost identical story from Dallas, but cover Shapiro-Steyn as well.
” The Dallas boy’s “prediction” appears to have been yet another case of general statements being misremembered or afforded greater significance than they merit in light of subsequent events. ” It’s pretty startling that a top reporter like Jonathan Alter from MSNBC preferred clairvoyance to this prosaic explanation.

More interestingly, Shapiro claims that the same boy predicted a plane crash in November 2001 and that he (Shapiro) reported this to the FBI three days before the crash of Flight 587 on November 12 2001. If true, this would be pretty impressive. On Shapiro’s theory (that the boy was speaking from inside knowledge) it would imply incredible incompetence by Al-Qaeda, leaking information to someone who had previously spilled the beans and been grilled by the police. Otherwise, if Shapiro’s account is to be believed, the case for clairvoyance looks strong. The only question is why Shapiro, who had extensive contact with national media on the first story, decided to sit on this one for ten months, then print it in an obscure magazine. After all, his contact with the FBI would be easy to verify if it took place as he says.

According to Status.Blogger.Com

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I’ve added five recent Financial Review columns to my website. They are:

• Market theory unravels, Australian Financial Review, 4 July.
• Bush leads way on race, Australian Financial Review, 18 July.
• Sums starting to sink in. Australian Financial Review 1 August
• Miracles are highly priced. Australian Financial Review 15 August
• Savings need a safety net. Australian Financial Review 29 August

For reasons I’m not clear on, there are two versions of my homepage and only one has been updated. I’ll try to fix this, but in the meantime apologies for any problems.

The Bush cheer-squad, including Andrew Sullivan, is busy praising the brilliance of Bush’s strategy, and the way he has seized the initiative from the UN. Assuming Bush’s real objective has been to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, his strategy has indeed been optimal. By putting forward a credible ‘ambit claim’ of regime change, and sending a series of mixed messages on unilateral action, Bush has ensured that he can extract a strong resolution from the UN Security Council demanding readmission of weapons inspectors. If Saddam doesn’t comply, the ground will be cut from under the opponents of military action.
But suppose Saddam does comply and is sensible enough to destroy whatever he has left of his weapons programs before the inspectors arrive. He gets a clean bill of health and there is no war. This would be a great thing for the world, but I can’t imagine it would make Andrew Sullivan too happy, especially since there would then be no real case for continued sanctions.
To put the point more bluntly, if Bush’s objective is to ensure an invasion of Iraq, his UN speech has ensured that the goal can be achieved only if Saddam chooses to assist him by refusing co-operation. It’s rarely a good strategy to hand the initiative to your opponent.

Update According to this analysis in The New Republic , the “war party” in the Bush administration is (rightly from their viewpoint) horrified by the prospect of an ultimatum on weapons inspection that Saddam might accept. Where does this leave Sullivan? Maybe he really is focused on the weapons issue, in which case good on him. Or maybe he wants war but is just not as smart as the rightwingers TNR is talking to.

Readers of this blog will have noticed that I’m very concerned with Pinochet, the former Chilean dicator, and very hostile to anyone who supported his regime or who now seeks to shield him from justice. Why should I be so concerned with one ex-dictator when there are dozens of others living in comfortable retirement, not to mention the numerous dictatorships that are still in place?

I was born in 1956 and a my political views were basically formed between 1968 and 1973. Against the background of the Cold War and Vietnam, I hoped for what would now be called a Third Way – peaceful progress towards social democracy and, ultimately, socialism. In that context, two beacons of hope were the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 and the election of the Allende government in Chile in 1970. The first provided hope that Communist governments would gradually move towards liberal democracy. The second seemed to be a demonstration that, regardless of your views about the best form of economic organisation (and I admit that Allende’s economic policies were unsound), democracy was the best way to push those views forward.

Both beacons were brutally snuffed out. The invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union (then ruled by Leonid Brezhnev) guaranteed another two decades of Cold War, and the repression of all forms of free thought. There were no mass executions, unlike Hungary in 1956, but the invasion finally discredited the Soviet Union for most Western leftists. The only significant exception was the French Communist party (PCF). Both the PCF and its philosophical supporters, most notably Louis Althusser, were permanently discredited (for me, anyway) by their stance.

The Pinochet coup of 1973 was bloodier and more brutal. Thousands were killed and ‘disappeared’, and torture was routine. Against the backdrop of the 20th century as a whole, this was a relatively minor event, but for a previously democratic country in the second half of the twentieth century, it seeemed unthinkable until it happened.

The Pinochet coup took place with the covert support of the US intelligence apparatus, and the government soon gained the overt support of three (overlapping) groups in the West. The first were advocates of realpolitik such as Henry Kissinger who viewed both the crushing of the Prague spring and the overthrow of Allende as sensible reassertions of control over their natural spheres of influence by hegemonic powers. The second were those, like Margaret Thatcher, who viewed the economic and social disorder of the 1970s as calling for the kind of authoritarian government that could impose the necessary discipline. The phrase ‘man on horseback’ was widely used at this time. The third were the ‘Chicago boys’, advocates of free-market policies whose advice was followed by Pinochet and who were willing, in return, to support his government. Over time, the second and third groups tended to merge, so that Thatcher is now better remembered for her free-market stance (to which she came only gradually) than for her lifelong authoritarianism.

My views on specific issues have, of course, evolved a lot since 1973. Nevertheless, I retain a visceral loathing for all those who supported either Brezhnev or Pinochet.