Going with the Zeitgeist

John Quiggin9 Comments

Well, I just bought my first pack of hot cross buns. Until now, I’ve vaguely tried to adhere to some notion of what’s appropriate to the season, but I guess I have to accept that Easter begins as soon as the last marked-down mince pies and Christmas puddings have been cleared from the shelves. Then I suppose there’s a month or two each for Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day before Christmas starts again in October (plus the various smaller occasions like Valentine’s Day).

My capitulation to the Zeitgeist on this matter doesn’t worry me too much. After all, I like hot cross buns. But I’m getting increasingly frequent comments on my furrowed brow. It’s no longer seen as the product of deep thought, but rather an indication that I’m too cheap to spring for Botox.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin21 Comments

This regular feature is back. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.

Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

The medium banana

John Quiggin52 Comments

I’ve been the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society meetings which were in Coffs Harbour this year, as the New England branch put them on. A nice change from the usual capital city locations, though this is the rainy season in Coffs just as it is in Brisbane.

One Coffs Harbour icon did not live up to my memories of the distant past[1]. The Big Banana isn’t very big. For me, it’s always been the exemplar of Australian bigness, but at 40 years old, it belongs to the Triassic era of Big Things (along with the Big Trout at Adaminaby, which I like a lot). The Big Prawn and so on are on a more Jurassic scale, and the Big Merino at Goulburn is positively Cretaceous: the ultrasaurus of such things.

fn1. I’ve driven through Coffs quite a few times, and not realised this, but that’s because I didn’t notice the Banana even when I was vaguely looking for it, expecting, as I did, something much bigger.

Colin’s canal, again

John Quiggin32 Comments

My piece in today’s Fin, over the fold, brings together arguments about the Kimberley canal project, which has been debated here on the blog. As usual, I got a lot out of all the comments, whether or not this is obvious in the published article. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the debate.
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Illegals, again

John Quiggin105 Comments

The government’s position on the Rau case seems pretty clear. Ms Rau was an ‘illegal’, that is, a person found to be in Australia and unable to satisfy the authorities that she had a legitimate right to be here. As was established in apartheid South Africa, where the term originated, illegals have no human or civil rights. They can be locked up in atrocious conditions, denied contact with the outside world and so on. Now the authorities are satisfied about her status, and she has been duly released.

Many commentators, including bloggers, have insisted upon both the term ‘illegal’ and the fact that such people have no human rights. All that is new is the discovery that an ‘illegal’ is anyone the government chooses to detain.

Copenhagen collapse

John Quiggin14 Comments

The wheels are coming off Bjorn Lomborg’s attempt to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. The Economist, which backed Lomborg’s exercise, published an interesting piece on climate change recently, noting that some members are dissenting, and ending with the observation, from Robert Mendelsohn, a critic of ambitious proposals for climate change mitigation, who worries that “climate change was set up to fail.â€?. This was my conclusion when I reviewed the book arising from the project.

It’s a pity, because, done well, the Copenhagen project could have been a really good idea, and even as it is, a lot of valuable work was done.
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An interesting find

John Quiggin25 Comments

While researching desalination, I found this interesting presentation (big PPP file) from the Water Corporation, including (slide 22) an estimated cost of $6.10 for a Kimberley pipeline with a capital cost of $11 billion[1]. It’s from a 2004 GHD report, so there’s no question of its being a political stunt. The pumping requires two 600 MW power stations, which suggests (if my mental arithmetic is right) around 50kw-hours for each Kl of water delivered. I’ve extracted the relevant slide here.

As an aside, I saw in the Fin that the proponents are suggesting diverting as much as 80Gl of the flow to irrigation along the way, leaving only 120/Gl for Perth. It’s unrealistic to expect any contribution to the capital costs from irrigation users, so the entire capital cost would have to be spread over the 120/Gl supplied to Perth, and the unit pumping cost would probably also rise. The delivered cost could easily exceed $10/Kl.

Update As Rob Corr points out, towing icebergs from Antarctica would be a lot cheaper.

Further update Rob’s source puts the iceberg option at $3.20/kl, but I’ve found another study that puts it at $17.00. So a canal at $10/kl would split the difference between these two.

fn1. Either the implied rate of return here is well below the one I used or the capacity is higher. I’d guess they are assuming bond financing and low depreciation. Still this sounds like a more realistic figure than the $2 billion Tenix estimate being used by Barnett. The power stations alone would chew up most of that.

Edging for the doors

John Quiggin5 Comments

What do you do if you hear that the bank that holds your savings is in difficulty? Unless you want to lose your money, you keep as quiet as possible and unobtrusively shift your deposits elsewhere. That’s what small-country central banks are doing with respect to US dollar-denominated securities.Nouriel Roubini has comments and reproduces much of a Financial Times story on this point.