Loaves and fishes (updated)

John Quiggin19 Comments

Readers who attended Sunday School will remember the story of miracle of the loaves and fishes, performed by Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. A couple of fish and a few loaves of bread proved sufficient to feed a multitude.

Something similar appears to be happening in the Galilee Basin, where large, but economically marginal, coal mines are supposed to produce massive wealth for everyone. The Courier-Mail has a report of a court case in which the Alpha mine, owned by GVK Hancock, is claimed to be capable of generating $44 billion in royalties. The royalty rate in Queensland is 10 per cent for coal prices below $100/tonne (prices above that level will almost certainly never be seen again). At the current price of around $65/tonne, that’s $6.50/tonne. Alpha claims to be able to produce 32 million tonnes a year. If realised, that would make a little over $200 million a year. That is, to realise the amount claimed, the mine would have to produce at its maximum capacity for over 200 years.

But that’s the least of the problems. GVK Hancock’s own estimate of the cash costs of extracting coal is $55/tonne and others are as high as $70/tonne (I don’t know if this includes royalties. So, even at the most optimistic estimates of cost and extraction rates we are looking at a margin of $10/tonne for 32 million tonnes or $320 million a year, out of which a variety of corporate overheads will have to be paid. The capital cost of the project will be at least $10 billion. So, at current prices, the gross return on capital before interest, depreciation and amortisation (and tax, if any is paid) is at most 3.2 per cent, barely equal to the rate of interest on Australian government bonds. Obviously, no sensible lender or equity investor would look at this project.

A similar analysis can be performed for Adani’s Carmichael mine, which has apparently lost the $1 billion in funding proposed to come from the State Bank of India, as well as $300 million in equity promised by the Newman LNP government.

Adani claims cash costs of less than $50/tonne, but this seems very optimistic, being dependent on the assumption that other coal projects will fall over, reducing wages and other input costs. But it has a much higher projected output, around 50-60 million tonnes by 2022. So, it could be generating $900 million a year in EBITDA. But it’s hard to see that covering depreciation and interest on a $10 billion project. And of course, another $10-$20 off the coal price would kill the project completely, taking the lenders’ money with it.

In essence, these projects are being kept on life support in the hope of a recovery in coal prices to levels near those that were prevailing when the projects began. That really would be a miracle

Sandpit

John Quiggin16 Comments

A new sandpit for long side discussions, idees fixes and so on. Unless directly responding to the OP, all discussions of nuclear power, MMT and conspiracy theories should be directed to sandpits (or, if none is open, message boards).

Locke’s theory of just expropriation (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

John Quiggin41 Comments

For quite a few years now, I’ve been working on a response to Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, a defence of free-market economics first published in 1946, but still in print and popular among libertarians. Hazlitt, as he says, is essentially just reworking Bastiat’s analysis of opportunity cost, represented by the broken window parable. What I’m trying to do is take the idea of opportunity cost seriously, and apply it across the board, including to issues of income distribution and property rights. It’s obvious (to me, at any rate) that any allocation of property rights to one or more people has an opportunity cost, namely the benefits that could be realised if the property rights were allocated to someone else. This is a live issue when property rights are being created explicitly right now, as they are with various kinds of intellectual property. But it is just as relevant when we come to consider the historical origins of property. I’ve spent a fair bit of time debating the question of whether property rights have a basis (say, in natural law) for existence independent of the states or governments that typically define and enforce them. I don’t want to talk about that issue right now, but it explains why I’m taking an interest in (I think) the most prominent proponent of natural law in relation to property, John Locke.

It’s a long time since I read Locke and, at the time, I was mostly concerned with Hume’s objection that

there is no property in durable objects, such as lands or houses, when carefully examined in passing from hand to hand, but must, in some period, have been founded on fraud and injustice.

That’s true of course. But rereading Locke[^1] I now conclude that he is not offering a theory of original acquisition, but rather one of expropriation, designed specifically to justify the “fraud and injustice” to which Hume refers.
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Goodbye to CPD

John Quiggin30 Comments

Like Mark Bahnisch, Eva Cox and a number of others, I’ve resigned as a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. It’s a sad day, since CPD has done a lot of great work, and I’ve enjoyed being involved in it. But the leadership of the Centre has taken a decision to move to the right in the hope of being more relevant to the policy process. The most recent outcome has been a paper on tax policy that broadly accepts the Treasury view of the issue, and pushes for a broadening of the GST base, which means taxation of fresh food. This isn’t a new or innovative idea. Rather, it has been part of rightwing orthodoxy for decades. CPDs endorsement allows its advocates to claim some “left” support. That claim obviously gained credibility from having Fellows like Mark, Eva and me. So, we had no alternative but to resign.

I should clarify that, apart from a nice title and a publishing outlet, I wasn’t getting any direct benefit from being part of CPD. So, I’m making a statement rather than a sacrifice.

Stop subsidising for-profit education

John Quiggin94 Comments

Among the many failures in the education ‘reform’ movement, the attempt to promote for-profit education has been the most complete. The Swedish experiment, for quite a few years seen as the exemplar of success, has turned out very badly.

In the US, the for-profit schools company Edison failed completely. Far worse for-profit universities like Phoenix, which have prospered by recruiting poor students, eligible for Federal Pell Grants, and enrolling them in degree programs they never finish. Phoenix collects the US government cash, while the students are lumbered with debts they can never repay and can’t even discharge in bankruptcy.

Several years ago, there was a major scandal in Victoria (which led the way in privatising vocational education) about similar practices.

This did not, of course, lead to any change for the better. Instead, governments across Australia followed the Victorian model. For-profit providers responded by emulating the University of Phoenix, with recruiters offering free laptops to anyone will to sign up for a course and the associated debts: the targeted groups were low-income earners who would not have to repay the income contingent loan except in the unlikely event that the course propelled them into the middle class.

This isn’t just a matter of fringe players: a report on A Current Affair[1] identified some of the biggest for-profit firms, such as Evocca, Careers Australia and Aspire. The Australian Skills Quality Authority is supposedly investigating. However, as with the authorities that are supposed to regulate greyhound racing, the obvious question is why, when these rorts have been common knowledge for years, a current affairs show can find the evidence ASQA has apparently missed.

It’s clear enough that privatisating VET-TAFE has been a failure, as would be expected based on international experience. But the answer isn’t to go back to the past. Rather, we need a national framework for post-school education, with funding both for TAFE and universities on an integrated basis.

There’s still the problem of how to wind down the for-profit system. I’d suggest that we could start by converting the better ones into contract providers of TAFE courses, and then gradually absorbing them into a unified system.

Those who don’t like that deal could compete like good capitalists in the open market, charging upfront fees and serving whatever market they could find, subject to ordinary consumer protection laws.

fn1. Presumably reflecting a change in the audience, A Current Affair has started targeting large-scale corporate wrongdoing rather than going solely after the easy target of dodgy tradespeople and low-grade con artists. Unfortunately, the story was spoiled by an apparently irrelevant attempt to drag in the Mormon affiliations of some of those involved in the basis, but you can’t have everything.

CO2 emissions levelling out?

John Quiggin236 Comments

Preliminary estimates from the International Energy Agency, released in March, suggest that energy-related emissions of CO2[1] were unchanged in 2014 compared to 2013. Countries experiencing notable drops in emissions included China, Britain, Germany and the EU as a whole, but not, of course, Australia[2]

This has happened before, but only in years of global recession, whereas the global growth rate in 2014 was around 3 per cent. Of course, there are plenty of special factors such as a good year for hydro in China. Still, after looking carefully at the numbers, I’ve come to the conclusion that this really does represent, if not the long-sought peak in emissions, at least the end of the link between rising living standards and CO2 emissions.

The most striking feature of 2014 in this context was the behavior of fossil fuel prices. Coal prices had already fallen a long way from their peak levels in the years around the GFC, and they kept on falling through the year, even as coal mines began to close and lots of projects were abandoned. Oil prices remained at historically high levels until the middle of the year but then joined the downward trend, which has continued into 2015. Natural gas is a more complex story, since there isn’t a global market, and I haven’t figured it out yet.

Still, it seems to me that the 2014 outcome is a consistent with a story in which most growth in demand for energy services will be met by a combination of renewables and energy efficiency, and in which coal continues to lose ground to gas. The lack of demand implies that fossil fuel prices are likely to stay permanently below the levels anticipated when most recent projects were initiated.

Behind all this, it seems as if the various piecemeal measures introduced with the aim of switching away from fossil fuels are working better than almost anyone expected, and with minimal economic cost. Hopefully, this will encourage world leaders to set more ambitious targets, consistent with stabilising the global climate at temperatures 2 degrees or less above pre-industrial levels.

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Sandpit

John Quiggin144 Comments

A new sandpit for long side discussions, idees fixes and so on. Unless directly responding to the OP, all discussions of nuclear power, MMT and conspiracy theories should be directed to sandpits (or, if none is open, message boards).