Changing places

John Quiggin67 Comments

As long-term readers here will know, I argued for quite a few years that, of the possible ways of putting a price on carbon, an emissions trading scheme was preferable to a tax (I set out my position here). But following the collapse of the Rudd government’s ETS deal with Malcolm Turnbull, and Rudd’s ultimately disastrous failure to call a double dissolution on the issue, I changed my mind.

This was partly because of changed circumstances, and partly because of a reconsideration of the politics surrounding compensation. In both cases, the driving force was the massively complicated set of free permits, exemptions and cash handouts with which the final ETS was saddled, nearly all of these going to large-scale emitters. I had seen the possibility of a limited issue of free permits as an advantage of an ETS, but now I think it was actually a weakness. And in political terms, the inordinate complexity of the CPRS made a strong case for something simple and comprehensible, where everyone understood that consumers would ultimately pay the price of carbon. Unlike with emissions permits, everyone understands that a tax on producers will be passed on (partially in the short run, and totally in the long run) to consumers, and therefore that any offsets or compensation should be directed primarily at consumers.

So, I now think a carbon tax is the best short-run option. There’s even a case, which a plan to discuss later, for leaving the tax in place when we come to introduce an emissions trading scheme, which is still the desirable outcome in the long run.

While I’ve come to support a carbon tax, John Humphreys, who formerly thought it the best (or perhaps least bad) option, is now vigorously opposing it. His change in position coincides with a change in political alignment, from the libertarian LDP to the Liberal Party, for which he was briefly an endorsed candidate last year. A few observations over the fold

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On the Internet, pretending to be a dog doesn’t help

John Quiggin23 Comments

As I mentioned below, I had an email discussion with Gerard Henderson regarding the proportion of alarmist cranks in the Coalition parties (he says 75 per cent, while I think a near-majority of Liberals and perhaps even some Nats are pro-science). The whole thing has now been posted at his Media Watch Dog site, but with an odd twist.

The conceit of the site is that the material is posted, not by Henderson, but by his dog. As if to demonstrate this, the item (taken directly from our emails) has my name repeatedly mis-spelt as “Quiggan”.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin6 Comments

It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. In keeping with my attempts to open up the comments to new contributors , I’d like to redirect discussion, and restatements of previous arguments, as opposed to substantive new contributions, to the sandpit(s). As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

Bolt vs the Bureau

John Quiggin13 Comments

Following my piece in yesterday’s Fin, Andrew Bolt wrote in to deny that he had ever accused the Bureau of fraud or dishonesty. More precisely, he concedes that he did once, presumably a reference to this piece, a direct accusation of dishonest against the Bureau and the CSIRO. But wait, there’s more.

The first Google blog hit under Bolt + Bureau is this letter from Joanne Nova and others, calling for an audit of the Bureau, and beginning with the claim that “The BOM claim their adjustments are “neutral” yet Ken Stewart showed that the trend in the raw figures for our whole continent has been adjusted up by 40%.” The letter is full of accusations of dishonesty and political bias. Presumably Bolt is going to claim that he is just reporting here, and again when he repeated this claim by Nova here

Maybe the same for this suggestion that “warmists” at the Bureau have rigged the rainfall figures for the MDB, run under the title Why did the Bureau remove the rain? (note that, unlike a journalist, Bolt gets to pick the headlines for his blog items).

And perhaps this, where he relays a claim by Warwick Hughes, that the “warming-evangelist” Bureau is “smudging” rainfall data to tilt the case in favor of global warming.

Alarmists

John Quiggin17 Comments

My column from today’s Fin is over the fold. I had a generally positive response, and also an interesting email exchange with Gerard Henderson. Gerard disputes my view that voting for Turnbull in the leadership election constituted evidence of a pro-science viewpoint, preferring to count only those who voted against Abbott’s subsequent abandonment of the ETS deal. And, he points, out the Nationals are uniformly anti-science. On this basis, as he observes, 75 per cent of Coalition parliamentarians are alarmist cranks. (At least, that’s the view he thinks I’m committed to, given the premise that only cranks believe in scientific absurdities and conspiracy theories like those of Monckton and Plimer – he appears to disagree, but it’s not clear why).

In any case, I prefer the more optimistic view stated in my conclusion that there is still time for pro-science conservatives to act.

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Monday Message Board

John Quiggin54 Comments

It’s time again for the Monday Message Board to resume. Post comments on any topic. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language. Lengthy side discussions to the sandpit, please.

How are people finding the site’s response time at present. It seems to me to have improved, but I’m still looking at options

After the Sauds

John Quiggin19 Comments

The downfall of the Gaddafi dictatorship now seems certain, despite brutal and bloody attempts at repression. The failure of these attempts kills off what was briefly the conventional wisdom, that dictatorships in the region can hold on if they “don’t blink“. At this point, Gaddafi and his remaining supporters will be lucky if they can make it to The Hague for their trials, rather than sharing the fate of the Ceaucescus.

Now a new conventional wisdom seems to be emerging, at least according to this article in the NY Times. The central idea is that while dictatorships (more accurately perhaps, tyrannies, in the classical sense of monarchs who have seized their thrones with no prior hereditary claim) are doomed, but that monarchies can survive with cosmetic concessions. In particular, on this analysis, the US relationship with the House of Saud can go on more or less as before.

There’s an element of truth here, but the central claim is wishful thinking

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The Bureau fights back

John Quiggin37 Comments

The idea that the Bureau of Meteorology is part of a global conspiracy to destroy Australia’s economy impose communist world government (or in some more prosaic versions, to increase its funding[1]) sounds like the basis of a bad comedy sketch. But, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, this claim is put forward, in apparent seriousness, by numerous anti-science advocates in Australia (Andrew Bolt, Jennifer Marohasy, and Warwick Hughes are leading examples) and implicily accepted by many others.

Now, as Graham Readfearn (h/t Tim Lambert) points out, the Bureau is fighting back.

Back in October last year, the Senate’s Environment and Communications Legislation Committee agreed to table a letter from Cardinal Pell which quoted heavily from Heaven and Earth to claim there were “good reasons for doubting that carbon dioxide causes warmer temperatures”.

The Director of the Bureau of Meteorology Dr Greg Ayers has now responded at an estimates hearing, demolishing Plimer’s bogus claims and pointing to numerous scathing reviews of his trashy and dishonest book. Ayers is great value, but the real fun in reading the Hansard transcript comes from the frantic attempts of Senators MacDonald and Boswell to stop him talking.

Update This post was critical of the Australian Academy of Science for what I’ve seen as a “missing in action” response to the attacks on climate science in Australia. In response, Martin Callinan of the Academy points me to this ABC Radio Interview with AAS President Kurt Lambeck, in which he gives a very critical review of Plimer’s book. I’ll also link to the AAS pamphlet, which is very good. That said, I don’t retract my main point which is that the Academy needs to take a much more vigorous line against the attacks on science and individual scientists which have become a pervasive feature of Australian political commentary.
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Epic #NewsCorpFail

John Quiggin8 Comments

Ms. Regan had once been involved in an affair with Mr. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner whose mentor and supporter, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, was in the nascent stages of a presidential campaign. The News Corporation executive, whom she did not name, wanted to protect Mr. Giuliani and conceal the affair, she said.

Now, court documents filed in a lawsuit make clear whom Ms. Regan was accusing of urging her to lie: Roger E. Ailes, the powerful chairman of Fox News and a longtime friend of Mr. Giuliani. What is more, the documents say that Ms. Regan taped the telephone call from Mr. Ailes in which Mr. Ailes discussed her relationship with Mr. Kerik.

It is unclear whether the existence of the tape played a role in News Corporation’s decision to move quickly to settle a wrongful termination suit filed by Ms. Regan, paying her $10.75 million in a confidential settlement reached two months after she filed it in 2007.

Depending on the specifics, the taped conversation could possibly rise to the level of conspiring to lie to federal officials, a federal crime, but prosecutors rarely pursue such cases, said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia University law professor and a former federal prosecutor.

Of course, if it were to be released, the tape could be highly embarrassing to Mr. Ailes, a onetime adviser to Richard M. Nixon whom critics deride as a partisan who engineers Fox News coverage to advance Republicans and damage Democrats, something Fox has long denied. Mr. Ailes also had close ties with Mr. Giuliani, whom he advised in his first mayoral race. Mr. Giuliani officiated at Mr. Ailes’s wedding and intervened on his behalf when Fox News Channel was blocked from securing a cable station in the city.

In a statement released on Wednesday, a News Corporation spokeswoman did not deny that Mr. Ailes was the executive on the recording. But the spokeswoman, Teri Everett, said News Corporation had a letter from Ms. Regan “stating that Mr. Ailes did not intend to influence her with respect to a government investigation.” Ms. Everett added, “The matter is closed.”

Ms. Everett declined to release the letter, and Ms. Regan’s lawyer, Robert E. Brown, said the News Corporation’s description of the letter did not represent Ms. Regan’s complete statement.

The new documents emerged as part of a lawsuit filed in 2008 in which Ms. Regan’s former lawyers in the News Corporation case accused her of firing them on the eve of the settlement to avoid paying them a 25 percent contingency fee. The parties in that case signed an agreement to keep the records confidential, but it does not appear that an order sealing them was ever sent to the clerk at State Supreme Court in Manhattan, and the records were placed in the public case file.

Discussion of the recorded conversation with Mr. Ailes emerges in affidavits from Ms. Regan’s former lawyers who are seeking to document the work they did on her case and for which they argue they deserve the contingency fee. They describe consulting with a forensic audio expert about the tape.

No transcript of the conversation is in the court records.

But Brian C. Kerr, one of Ms. Regan’s former lawyers, describes in an affidavit the physical evidence he reviewed as “including a tape recording of a conversation between her and Roger Ailes, which is alluded to throughout the complaint” that Mr. Kerr and another lawyer, Seth Redniss, drafted for Ms. Regan. That complaint said News Corporation executives “were well aware that Regan had a personal relationship with Kerik.”

“In fact,” the complaint said, “a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”

Mr. Redniss, in his affidavit, referred to “a recorded telephone call between Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News (a News Corp. company) and Regan, in which Mr. Ailes discussed with Regan her responses to questions regarding her personal relationship with Bernard Kerik.”

“The ‘Ailes’ matter became a focal point of our work,” Mr. Redniss continued.

The dispute involves a cast of well-known and outsize personalities; it also includes some New Yorkers who have had spectacular career meltdowns.

Mr. Kerik was sent to prison last year after pleading guilty to federal charges including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.

The law firm Ms. Regan hired to draft her complaint against News Corporation was headed by Marc S. Dreier, whose firm was cast into bankruptcy in 2008 when he was charged with a $100 million fraud scheme. The firm’s suit seeking the contingency fee from Ms. Regan is being led by the bankruptcy trustee handling the dissolution of the firm. Mr. Redniss was a co-counsel to the Dreier firm.

Ms. Regan’s own crash was remarkable in itself. While often controversial for her book choices, which ranged from literary novels to sex advice from a pornography star, her imprint at HarperCollins had become one of the more financially successful in the business.

The end came quickly in late 2006. Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman, was quoted saying it had been “ill advised” for her to pursue “If I Did It,” a hypothetical murder confession by O. J. Simpson. A novel that included imagined drunken escapades by Mickey Mantle drew another round of outrage.

Then News Corporation said Ms. Regan had been fired because she made an anti-Semitic remark to a Jewish HarperCollins lawyer, Mark H. Jackson, in describing the internal campaign to fire her as a “Jewish cabal.”

In her 2007 suit, Ms. Regan said the book controversies had been trumped up and the anti-Semitic remark invented to discredit her, should she ever speak out about Mr. Kerik in ways that would harm Mr. Giuliani’s image. The new court documents expand upon that charge and link it to Mr. Ailes. Mr. Redniss wrote in an affidavit that Ms. Regan told him that Mr. Ailes sought to brand her as promiscuous and crazy.

“Regan believed that Ailes and News Corp. subsidiary Fox News had an interest in protecting Giuliani’s bid for the U.S. presidency,” he wrote.

In addition to serving as chairman of Fox News, Mr. Ailes has taken a broader role at News Corporation, including oversight of Fox’s local television stations and Fox Business Network.

As part of the settlement in January 2008, News Corporation publicly retracted the allegation that Ms. Regan had made an anti-Semitic remark to Mr. Jackson.

The court records examined by The New York Times this week, which have subsequently been taken out of the public case file, also reveal another interesting footnote. After Ms. Regan fired her lawyers, a seemingly unlikely figure came forward to help settle the case: Susan Estrich, a law professor and a regular Fox commentator whose book Ms. Regan had published, according to Ms. Regan’s affidavit.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

via nytimes.com

Posted via email from John’s posterous