Last night I went to hear Warwick McKibbin at the Brisbane Institute talking about climate change. It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.
One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.
It doesn’t seem to me that the restriction to national markets is crucial, at least to the long-term part of the plan. A modified version that incorporated some form of international trade would be more appealing.
One of the many useful services performed by Glenn Reynolds is his chronicling of the relentless decline of Moqtada al-Sadr. Some past instalments
The murders are the first sign of organised Iraqi opposition to Sadr’s presence a apr 29, 04
those who thought Sadr represented a mass movement among Iraqis were seriously mistaken. [May 5, 04]
ANOTHER BAD DAY for the increasingly irrelevant Sadr. [May 26, 04]
SADR’S DECLINE CONTINUES [Jun 17, 04]
Demonstrators shouted chants denouncing al-Sadr, including one that equated him with deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. [Sep 3, 04]
Bush has successfully mitigated the perils of having to grapple with two insurgencies simultaneously– through a nuanced combination of sophisticated counter-insurgency efforts and attendant political machinations contra Moktada al-Sadr. [Nov 1, 04]
And now:
Moqtada al-Sadr doesn’t like the surge. That he’s saying so from a secret location may explain why. . . .
I think it’s time for Glenn to let up on the guy. Hated, with no public support, isolated, irrelevant, outfoxed by the sophisticated Bush and now a lonely fugitive, surely by this time he’s too unimportant for a post.
With Al Gore winning the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth and the CBC news “The Denial Machine” airing on Four Corners last night, it must be getting hard to hold on to the delusions that have been propagated so vigorously throughout the parallel universe created by Fox News and similar bodies. While it’s no news to anyone who reads blogs on the topic, the revelation that the “skepticism” propagated by our local delusionists was produced by recycled hacks for the tobacco industry, such as Fred Singer and Fred Seitz (I was mildly disappointed that Steve Milloy didn’t get a run) must have shaken a few more people awake.
“Happy Feet”, an Australian animated feature about penguins that has been attacked by the Fox News delusion machine because it refers to overfishing, also scored a gong. No doubt, Neil Cavuto would have preferred an award to the Astroturf exercise on penguins produced by DCI. It’s delusion all the way down with these guys.
* The problem of terminology has always been difficult. It’s obviously unreasonable to use terms like “skeptic” or “contrarian” to describe people who produce or swallow transparently fraudulent propaganda like that of Singer and Seitz because it happens to suit their preconceived ideological views or financial interest. On the other hand, there have been vigorous objections to “denialist”. So, I’m switching to “delusionists”, a term which covers:
(i) people who manufacture delusions for a living like those mentioned already and their local counterparts
(ii) people who prefer to accept ideologically convenient delusions rather than face the truth
(iii) people who have genuinely been deluded by this propaganda (not many of these left in Australia now).
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Looking at the stories of pervasive corruption coming out of the Burke inquiry in WA, a point I haven’t seen noted is that Federal Labor dodged a bullet by dumping Kim Beazley just as the scandal was breaking. Beazley was no doubt telling the truth when he said he’d never spoken with Burke about the latter’s business interests. Still, given is role in WA Labor, he could scarcely have been unaware that Burke was in a position to influence ALP preselections, and that Burke was using that power for his own personal enrichment. That might not have been a crime, but it was obviously damaging to the Labor party. And given the damage Burke had already caused, having such a person as a friend was an indication of judgement so poor as to cast doubt on Beazley’s capacity for high office.
Sticking with state issues, I can’t recall such a deplorable choice as that being faced by the voters of NSW on May 24. If ever a Labor party could do with a spell in opposition to sort itself out, the NSW branch is that party. Iemma seems decent enough, but thoroughly mediocre, Carr made a dreadful mess of things but profited handsomely out of it, and the ministerial team seems On the other hand, thinking over the string of mediocrities, sharpers and no-hopers who’ve led the NSW Liberals since the corrupt but competent Robin Askin departed the scene, I can’t thing of one who’s less appealing than Peter Debnam.
By contrast with these states and with the systematic corruption of the Federal government (the fact that no-one in government can be charged with anything over the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars to Saddam Hussein indicates a situation far worse than if a single minister or public servant had acted corruptly), the problems faced by the other Labor state governments seem pretty minor. Still, I nearly spat out my morning coffee when I read that Peter Beattie was canvassing yet another canal project, reviving and expanded the Bradfield scheme. I can only hope this is some sort of diversionary tactic.
Update Not as clean a dodge as all that, as it emerges that Rudd met Burke several times. The factional system that gives power to people like Burke is a disaster for Labor. More generally, the decay of mass political parties is a big problem for Australia.
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Felix Salmon gnashes his teeth at yet another incorrect report on discounting and the Stern review, by David Leonhardt in the New York Times.
Using his discount rate and other assumptions, a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now is roughly as valuable as 7 cents spent reducing emissions today. (In fact, it’s less than that, because Stern adds another discount rate, called delta, on top of eta.)
Leonhardt says that “spending a dollar on carbon reduction today to avoid a dollar’s worth of economic damage in 2107 doesn’t make sense” – but this is a straw man, since Stern never comes close to saying that we should do such a thing. Leonhardt also spends a lot of time on the academic qualifications of Stern’s opponents, but neglects to mention that Stern himself, a former chief economist of the World Bank, is actually a real expert on discount rates, and understands them much better than most economists do.
Salmon is right, both about the Leonhardt piece and, unfortunately, about the limited understanding of discounting issues on the part of economists in general.
Read more…
Nicholas Gruen is organizing a group subscription to Crikey. Big savings are available. To capture network externalities, get in contact with him. Details here
Seeing a link to a story headed Cheney brings out the hate in peaceniks I thought it would be the usual stuff from one of the increasingly desperate pro-war pundits at the Oz. But this piece purports to be a news story.
The actual events detailed in the story don’t do much to justify the headline or the similarly hyperbolic opening paras. A small group of protesters (about 350) marched down George Street despite not receiving police permission. Scuffles broke out and ten people were arrested and charged when protesters tried to break through police lines. No injuries were reported on either side. In other words, a run-of-the-mill minor demo just like hundreds of others we have seen.
Although the Oz has been increasingly detached from reality lately (its editorial the other day referred to Howard’s triumph over Rudd in the Obama stoush, and it has long since lost the plot on global warming) it has generally made at least some attempt to adhere to the idea that news and opinion are supposed to be separate. Obviously, that particular shark has now been jumped.
Over at Club Troppo, James Farrell summarises the main elements of the economic research agenda on happiness, and some of the standard objections to it. For those who came in late, and probably didn’t imagine economists ever thought about happiness, the crucial finding is that “Cross country data shows pretty consistently that on average happiness increases with income, but at a certain point diminishing returns set in. In the developed world, people are not on average happier than they were in the 1960s.”
The data that supports this consists of surveys that ask people to rate their happiness on a scale, typically from 1 to 10. Within any given society, happiness tends to rise with all the obvious variables: income, health, family relationships and so on. But between societies, or in Western societies like Australia over time, there’s not much difference even though both income and health (life expectancy, for example) have improved pretty steadily for a long time.
I’ve long argued that these questions can’t really tell us anything, and an example given by Don Arthur gives me the chance to put it better than I’ve done before, I hope.
Suppose you wanted to establish whether children’s height increased with age, but you couldn’t measure height directly.
Read more…
Looking at the desperation with which opponents of climate science, and of sensible policy responses such as Kyoto, are holding on to positions that have clearly become untenable, has prompted me to think about my own views on a range of issues, to see whether I am holding on to beliefs that can’t be sustained in the light of accumulating evidence.
The most obvious problem for me is that of continued macroeconomic stability in the face of trade and current account deficits driven (or so it seems) by speculative asset price booms. I’ve long argued that such deficits can’t be sustained and that neither Australia nor the US is on a path to a smooth adjustment. However, while deficits have continued and, in the case of the US, grown steadily, evidence of anything but smooth adjustment is certainly thin on the ground.
The rapid growth of China, and the apparent willingness of the Chinese government (and maybe also the public) to hold low-return $US assets and to buy large quantities of commodity exports from Australia has rendered previous projections largely irrelevant. While the “Bretton Woods II” story that emerged a couple of years ago seemed implausible to me, it has held up pretty well so far.
While I’m not ready to join the optimists just yet, it’s clearly necessary to rethink the implications of a Chinese economy that is already a substantial part of the global total, and growing rapidly.
Read more…
Things have been pretty frantic at the Risk and Sustainable Management Group (my research team at UQ, focusing on the Murray-Darling and related issues) as we raced to prepare five papers for the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society meeting in Queenstown NZ last week. There’s lots of news about this at the RSMG blog.
We’ve also had a complete redesign of our website, which is now located here. We’ll be updating Working Papers and adding lots of publications in the near future.
I plan to write more about water and climate at this blog in future. Discussion much encouraged.
Looking at the desperation with which opponents of climate science, and of sensible policy responses such as Kyoto, are holding on to positions that have clearly become untenable, has prompted me to think about my own views on a range of issues, to see whether I am holding on to beliefs that can’t be sustained in the light of accumulating evidence.
The most obvious problem for me is that of continued macroeconomic stability in the face of trade and current account deficits driven (or so it seems) by speculative asset price booms. I’ve long argued that such deficits can’t be sustained and that neither Australia nor the US is on a path to a smooth adjustment. However, while deficits have continued and, in the case of the US, grown steadily, evidence of anything but smooth adjustment is certainly thin on the ground.
The rapid growth of China, and the apparent willingness of the Chinese government (and maybe also the public) to hold low-return $US assets and to buy large quantities of commodity exports from Australia has rendered previous projections largely irrelevant. While the “Bretton Woods II” story that emerged a couple of years ago seemed implausible to me, it has held up pretty well so far.
While I’m not ready to join the optimists just yet, it’s clearly necessary to rethink the implications of a Chinese economy that is already a substantial part of the global total, and growing rapidly.
Read more…
Blogospheric opinion has divided on predictable lines over the Queensland Land and Resources Tribunal’s rejection of objections to a new coal mine by environmental groups who wanted offsets for the carbon emissions of the mine. Brickbats have come from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Lambert and Robert Merkel, while Jennifer Marohasy and Andrew Bolt have cheered the Tribunal and its presiding member, President Koppenol.
But this looks awfully like an own goal for the denialists to me.
Read more…
Another of many alarming reports about environmental damage that may be linked to climate change. In this case, the result is the emergence of dead zones in the ocean, the immediate cause being changes in currents.
Examples like this emphasise the point that uncertainty about global warming is not a reason for doing less, but a reason for doing more. The known (but uncertain) possible consequences of doing nothing add a lot more to the expected costs than do the known (but uncertain) possibilities of adaptation and so on producing lower-than-expected costs. Even more important, the ‘unknown unknowns’, that is, the possible consequences of which we are not yet aware, are dominated by nasty surprises that await us if we continue changing the climate rapidly.
Read more…
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Peter Costello makes the plausible point that, if the charges against David Hicks are true, he could have killed Australian soldiers. But the same story in the SMH goes on to say
Australia has steadfastly refused to ask for Hicks to be released from Guantanamo because he could not be tried for his alleged crimes in Australia.
How can this be true? Under the Australian Criminal Code,
“A person commits an offence, called treason, if the person:
….
(e) engages in conduct that assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist, an enemy:
(i) at war with the Commonwealth, whether or not the existence of a state of war has been declared; and
(ii) specified by Proclamation made for the purpose of this paragraph to be an enemy at war with the Commonwealth; or
(f) engages in conduct that assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist:
(i) another country; or
(ii) an organisation;
that is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; or
I can’t see how the alleged crimes for which Hicks is to be tried in the US are not covered by this crime (note, by contrast, that it is not necessarily a crime for an Australian to fight against the US, which explains the constantly shifting charges brought against Hicks there).
This has been tightened up a bit since 2001, when the relevant section of the Crimes Act read
(d) assists by any means whatever, with intent to assist, an enemy:
(i) at war with the Commonwealth, whether or not the existence of a state of war has been declared; and
(ii) specified by proclamation made for the purpose of this paragraph to be an enemy at war with the Commonwealth;
….
(f) forms an intention to do any act referred to in a preceding paragraph and manifests that intention by an overt act;
but it seems clear that if Hicks agreed to fight with the Taliban against a Coalition including Australia, as claimed in the charges against him, he’s guilty of treason.
The only meaning I can impute to the government’s position is that Hicks could not be convicted of treason because the evidence the American prosecutors plan to use (confessions extracted under torture, hearsay and so on) would be thrown out of an Australian court.
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
It’s not that long ago that people like Alan Gilbert (then Vice-Chancellor at Melbourne, and now at Manchester) were presenting the for-profit University of Phoenix as the future of education, and its critics as Luddite equivalents of the 19th century handloom weavers. It was obvious even at the time that U Phoenix was little more than a grandiosely titled trade school, occupying one of the relatively limited educational niches where for-profit firms have traditionally played a role. But even here it seems, there are pretty big problems, with a graduation rate of only 16 per cent for students without previous college experience. However hard you spin it,* this is an unimpressive result.
Read more…
I’ve been struck, if not surprised by the eagerness of the usual crowd to jump on the latest story casting doubt on the reality of anthropogenic global warming, in this case the cosmic ray story being pushed by Svensmark and Calder. You would think after so many previous hopes (urban heat islands, satellite data, the adaptive iris, attacks on the hockey stick and so on) have come to nothing, and with the public debate lost beyond any real hope of salvage, that sensible rightwingers would at least wait and see before running their usual boilerplate on stories like this.
At the very least, in this age of Google, you’d think they might check whether the story is actually a new one. In fact, like most such claims, the cosmic ray idea has been around for quite a while. It’s been taken to pieces many times (William Connolley covers the story as Revenge of the killer cosmic rays from hell). It even got batted about on Oz blogs a few years back. Of course, the cosmic ray theory might pan out, but looking at the mountain of evidence pointing the other way, and the failure of so many previous efforts in this direction, you wouldn’t want to bet your credibility on it, assuming you had any.
At this point, I can’t help but be reminded of the running joke in Peanuts where Lucy promises to hold the football so Charlie Brown can kick it. Every time, she tells him, it will be different from all the previous times. Every time, Charlie falls for it. And every time, she pulls the ball away at the last minute.
(Corrected thanks to Paul G Brown).
As well as being Valentine’s Day, today is Library Lovers Day.
Libraries are one of the great institutions of our society, and the public library was the first great manifestation of the idea that ‘information wants to be free’.
These days, I do most of my library use online, and physical visits to libraries are more of a consumption experience. It’s great to browse through stacks of books and enjoy the odd contiguities created by cataloging systems – in my experience, Dewey has a particularly large random element. Of course, the Internets have their own versions of this kind of thing, but the magic of the stacks is still there.
A really great experience not long ago was touring the New York Public Library, one of the great public libraries of the world, which benefits hugely from endowments provided by once-poor migrants who got their education in its reading rooms. Over the fold, there’s a picture of one of its treasures, a Gutenberg bible (it turned out I wasn’t really supposed to photograph it, but I wasn’t asked to delete the photo so I assume it’s OK to share it in the general spirit of library love).
Read more…
Australian news rarely makes it out of the sporting pages internationally (and we’re not looking too good there just now) so it’s pretty exciting for us to make into New York Times coverage of the presidential election campaign. The occasion is a statement by our prime minister, John Howard, to the effect that a vote for the Democrats, and in particular for Barack Obama, would be a vote for Al Qaeda*.
This is not the first time an Australian political leader has commented on the choices available to US electors. A few years ago, then Opposition leader Mark Latham described Bush as ‘incompetent and dangerous’, but this accurate observation did not seem to have much effect in the 2004 US election campaign and probably contributed to Latham’s defeat in the Australian election the same year.
Latham was well known as a loose cannon, and this kind of remark was in character, but Howard has generally been seen as the embodiment of cautious solidity. As far as US politics go, he’s generally been seen as an advocate of unconditional support for US policy, regardless of the political colour of the Administration. He’s been very happy to cash in on his close relationship with Bush, but he was quite keen enough for photo-ops with Clinton. So what possessed him to take a high-risk, low return line like this ?
Read more…
Just before Xmas, I wrote a paper for CEDA about water policy, with themes I and others have been writing on for some time, including the need to repurchase irrigation water rights for urban use and environmental flows, and some sceptical comments about the idea of a Federal takeover of water (then being pushed by Peter Costello, IIRC).
CEDA released the paper today (I did a briefing last week) and it’s had a fair bit of coverage (at least by comparison with most stuff I put out), including a nice mention from Andrew Leigh. I’ve posted the PDF over the fold. Comments appreciated.
Read more…
I was thinking yesterday about a column for the Fin, on the subject of personal relationships between Australian PMs and overseas leaders (prime examples being Keating-Suharto and Howard-Bush) and arguing that such relationships weren’t in our long-term interest since they create a risk of conflict with the domestic opponents of the leaders concerned, who may themselves be in power in the future.
Somehow I suspect that, by the time my column runs on Thursday, that idea will look rather old-hat.
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Now that nearly everybody (except US Republicans, of course) accepts the scientific evidence on global warming, the problem is to determine the best available response. As I’ve argued before, the main obstacle to action is the belief that we can’t protect the environment unless we are willing to accept a radical reduction in our standard of living.
Read more…
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Driving in Brisbane the other day, I noticed an ad for domain.com.au, claiming their website was so easy anyone could use it. This was illustrated by a picture of George W. Bush, looking mystified by a laptop.
It’s striking that the advertisers thought no potential customers (or not enough to matter) would be put off by the assumption that the leader of the free world is a byword for stupidity.* This in turn raises the question of why the Australian government remains so supinely obedient to this lame duck, over Iraq, Kyoto, the Hicks case and so on.
* Strictly speaking, Bush isn’t stupid. He’s shown himself to be quite sharp in the pursuit of his own short term interests and those of his backers. But he’s ignorant, narrow-minded, intellectually lazy and unwilling to learn from experience, a combination that produces reliably stupid policy decisions.
Now that charges have finally been filed against David Hicks, it occurred to me to wonder what would happen if the trial proceeds and he is acquitted. The answer, it appears, is nothing. More precisely, if acquitted, Hicks will go back to Guantanamo Bay unless and until the US Administration chooses to release him.
That at least was the situation in 2002 according to this article by Ronald Dworkin, stating that the Pentagon reserves the right to hold detainees indefinitely, regardless of the trial outcome. And a group of Chinese Uighurs were held at Guantanamo for more than a year after military review panels had determined that they were not enemy combatants. This Wikipedia article includes a statement by Rumsfeld to the same effect.
Maybe this has been changed by the legislation passed last year. But if so, I can’t find any evidence to this effect. In fact, by removing any rights for aliens declared as enemy combatants by the Administration, the Military Commissions Act appears to confirm the power claimed by Rumsfeld to hold Hicks (or any non-citizen) without any resort to habeas corpus and regardless of any trial outcome.
Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science has joined forces with Alan Sokal, scourge of leftwing relativism and pseudoscience, in an LA Times op-ed piece on the current state of the Science Wars.
As Mooney and Sokal note, the decline of antiscience views on the left
frees up defenders of science to combat the enemy on our other flank: an unholy (and uneasy) alliance of economically driven attacks on science (on issues such as global climate change, mercury pollution and what constitutes a good diet) and theologically impelled ones (in areas such as evolution, reproductive health and embryonic stem cell research).
Read more…
Recent Comments