Global Energy Monitor, Greenpeace India, and the Sierra Club have just released the fifth annual Boom and Bust report, tracking the global coal plant pipeline. The news is mostly good, with three glaring exceptions, all related to China.

First, as reported last year, provincial governments appear to have restarted construction on a number of coal-fired power plants, previously suspended on the orders of the central government. Second, the China Electricity Council, which represents the country’s power utilities, has proposed setting the country’s coal capacity cap at 1,300 gigawatts, a level that would allow 290 gigawatts of new capacity to be added—more than the entire coal fleet of the U.S. (259 gigawatts). Finally, Chinese financial institutions, mostly state-owned are the last large scale backers of coal-fired projects at a global level.

It remains to be seen how this will play out. Perhaps the central govenment will pull the provinces and state-owned enterprises into line and override the Electricity Council.

The bigger lesson here is that even though China is well on the way to becoming a personal dictatorship of Xi Jinping, and despite the supposedly Leninist organization of the Communist party he leads (the official phrase is “democratic centralism“) most of the real power in the country is exercised by local magnates, just as it was in the days of warlord rule. That seems to be characteristic of dictatorship.

Over the fold, the good news

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The Australian Science Media Centre provides responses from scientists and other experts (including me as an economist) to news releases about science-related issues, including climate. A couple of recent examples;

A very quick response to Labor’s climate policy. My take

“As an oil importing country with no domestic car manufacturing industry, Australia is well placed to make the shift to electric vehicles proposed by Labor. A crucial step towards this goal will be the restructuring of the National Electricity Market, and the design of charging infrastructure to encourage flexible recharging of electric vehicles to match peaks in the availability of renewable energy.”

and one on the very depressing Global State of the Climate Report, where I said

“Following the depressing news from the International Energy Agency that global CO2 emissions rose to a record high in 2018, the WMO report confirms that severe impacts of climate change are already being felt.  This scientific analysis only confirms what is evident to anyone who examines the evidence with an open mind: the global climate is changing in ways that are unprecedented in human experience. Sadly, many of our leaders do not have an open mind. Rather, they are committed to denying the findings of climate science at any cost, in order to defend sectional economic interests and backward-looking identity politics. Australia in particular needs urgent action to achieve substantial reductions in emissions over the next decade.”

That’s the headline for my latest piece in The Conversation, my contribution to a three-part series mini-symposium on Wages, Unemployment and Underemployment presented by The Conversation and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Key quote

For more than forty years, both the architecture of labour market regulation and the discretionary choices of governments have been designed with the precise objective of holding wages down. These policies have been highly successful.

Update: Paul Krugman has a recent piece in the New York Times, also making the point that technological progress isn’t responsible for the falling wage share.

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.

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. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link

http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page

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. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link

http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page

Federal Government last night released an independent interim assessment of the recent fish deaths. The report is damning, but you wouldn’t know that reading the press release from the relevant minister, David Littleproud.

Here’s my response, which I provided to the Australian Science Media Centre

The Report clearly describes the “antecedent conditions” which made the Lower Darling so vulnerable to large-scale fish deaths, all of which reflect policy failures of the current government: These include increased upstream extractive use of water, the decision to release water from Menindie Lakes in 2016 and the extreme climatic conditions which are the “new normal” as a result of climate change. The Minister’s statement ignores all of these factors, and focuses only on the immediate causes of the disaster.

The government has rejected water buybacks as a means of increasing flow, ignored environmental concerns in the management of the Menindie Lakes and rejected any action to mitigate climate change. This was a human-made disaster, for which the present government bears substantial responsibility.

Adani has been pretty quiet after the publication of a leaked memo from its newly hired law firm AJ & Co, named for its founder and managing partner, Andrew Johnson. AJ promised to act as an “attack dog” to silence opponents and sue them into bankruptcy, something Adani is already attempting in the case of indigenous leader Adrian Burragubba (I understand that funds have been raised to ensure that this doesn’t happen).

This is what is known= as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) and is illegal in many US jurisdictions though not (AFAICT) in Australia. The Environmental Defender’s Office, one of the targets of Adani/AJ action, has a useful guide. This kind of thing used to be covered by the common law offence of barratry (Dante consigned barrators to the Eighth Circle of Hell), but this offence has either been abolished or fallen into disuse.

This and other actions by Adani seem to have finally pushed the Labor Party off the fence. A minority (including the CFMMEU, its longtime enemy Joe Ludwig and Townsville local member Cathy O’Toole) have come out in support of Adani, but the majority correctly see Adani as an enemy to be resisted and defeated.

The right remedy here is political rather than (primarily) legal. Adani and AJ have declared war on the environment and anyone who wants to save it, and should expect no quarter in return. Hopefully, they will suffer the same fate as the most famous (until now) exponent of the SLAPP suit, Gunns in Tasmania and its chairman John Gay.