Brown coal

John Quiggin44 Comments

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.

All change in NSW

John Quiggin35 Comments

One thing I’ve learned in life, though not always applied, is that if you ignore a job long enough, it often goes away. I was going to write a post excoriating Maurice Iemma and Michael Costa for their handling of the electricity privatisation issue, but it doesn’t matter much now (retail privatisation may still go ahead, but that’s not such a big deal either way). The earlier departure of deputy premier John Watkins is more of a loss, though no real surprise.

Labor now has a chance to salvage a government that looked to be utterly doomed. It’s a long shot, but the NSW Liberals have a long record of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so who knows.

Double dissolution ahead

John Quiggin38 Comments

A week ago my Fin column (over the fold) predicted a double dissolution over legislation to establish an emissions trading scheme. The rejection of the government’s changes to luxury car tax shortens the odds considerably. The government made a number of compromises to satisfy the Greens and Nick Xenophon that highly fuel-efficient vehicles would be excluded, but that only made it harder (in the end, impossible) to deal with Steve Fielding of Family First. The same problems will emerge, in spades, with an emissions trading scheme.

It seems likely that lots of legislation will be rejected between now and the time an ETS becomes a trigger,. If the government can hold its nerve, and its popularity, a double dissolution will look very attractive by then.

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Methane

John Quiggin38 Comments

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

Oil and war

John Quiggin29 Comments
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It’s pretty widely assumed that several recent wars (most obviously those in Iraq and Georgia) have been motivated, in part at least, by the desire to control oil and other valuable resources including natural gas and (one that is close to my heart) water. The other side of the same coin is the idea (again evident in both these cases) that countries with control over valuable resources can use that control to further their own geopolitical ends.

But examples where either of these strategic ideas has been applied with success are thin on the ground to say the least. While I don’t subscribe to simple ideas of “war for oil” in relation to Iraq, it’s pretty clear that one of the many motives for going to war was the desire to put Iraq’s oil under the control of a government friendly to the US (and preferably not so friendly to rivals like France and Russia). The war has been as spectactular a failure in this respect as in many others. With the best part of a trillion dollars already spent and trillions more to come, the US is worse off in the oil market than it has ever been.

On the other side, the oil embargo of 1973 signalled the change from a market dominated by a buyer cartel to one dominated by a seller cartel. But in geopolitical terms it was a disaster. The Israeli occupation arising from the 1967 war, then only six years old, is still almost intact 35 years later (the Egyptians got the Sinai back, but not because they had any oil).

More generally, I suspect that countries wanting oil can’t do better than to buy it at the going price, and that those wanting to maximise the benefits from owning oil would be best off selling it for the same price and using the money to promote their strategic goals (or, more sensibly, investing it in projects like education).

Of course, showing that it’s stupid to go to war over oil doesn’t prove that people won’t do it. Empirical observation gives us plenty of evidence of the fact that people are more than usually stupid when war is concerned. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell’s Great Illusion demolished the idea that modern nations could secure economic benefits by fighting over war and resources. He was proved right in the most appalling way possible: the Great War that began in 1914 led to the ruin of all the parties.

More MWF blogging: Who are the gatekeepers

John Quiggin13 Comments

I’ve been to some great sessions at the Melbourne Writers Festival, most recently meeting and listening to Andrew Davies who’s written of the lot of the great BBC adaptations of classics like Pride and Prejudice, not to mention Bridget Jones’ Diary.

My first session last night was about blogging, under the title “Who are the Gatekeepers” with Margaret Simons and Antony Loewenstein, both of whom, unlike me, had an actual book to talk about. I read both The Content Makers (made even more relevant by the Fairfax job cuts and strike happening as the Festival got under way) and the Blogging Revolution and both are well worth it.

The topic led me to think about the gatekeeping function of the mass media (this is cultstud jargon for deciding what’s important and who’s authoritative). My assessment, based on recent experience was fairly negative. I see three ways in which the old media gatekeepers have failed, and in which bloggers have been effective critics.

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MWF blogging

John Quiggin11 Comments

I’ve only been to a couple of events at the Melbourne Writers Festival so far[1], but already this statement from Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty has been worth the trip for me. Responding to a rant against Darwinism as religious orthodoxy, coming not from a creationist but from a neo-Lamarckian viewpoint[2], Doherty said:

Science is revolutionary, which is why George W. Bush and John Howard hate it so much

Well said!

I’ll be talking about blogging and gatekeepers at the BMW Edge, Federation Square this evening at 5:30 and on Parched, the Politics of Water tomorrow (nearly sold out, so hurry if you’re interested). More details here.

fn1. I had to go to a climate change symposium in Canberra en route which made for a hectic trip, but also allows meant I could do the Canberra gig while minimising extra CO2 emissions.

Fortunes of war

John Quiggin56 Comments

Things have gone better than expected (certainly better than I expected) in Iraq over the past year[1]. On the other hand, things are going very badly in Afghanistan. For those, like me, who have supported the war in Afghanistan and opposed the war in Iraq, this raises some points to consider.

Most obviously, war is inherently unpredictable and dangerous, and there is no necessary correlation between the justness of a cause and its military success. That means, among other things, that launching a war (or revolution) on the basis of a cause that seems justified to those starting it, but which has little or no hope of success (indeed without strong grounds for expecting a good outcome after the inevitable loss of life on all sides is taken into account), is not glorious but criminally reckless.

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