After a long break, it’s time for another weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. Side discussions to sandpits, please. Absolutely no personal criticism of other commenters.
Here’s the letter I’ve sent to (I hope!) everyone who’s signed up for my mailing list.
Hi everyone,
I’ve now received more than 60 requests to join the mailing list, so I thought I would send a quick note to everyone thanking them for their requests and the kind words many of you have added. I’ll be checking for messages that bounce and I’ll also post on my blog and social media pages so that people who miss out can tell me about it.
My plan at this stage is to send the email once a week on Mondays. I’ll include links to blog posts and tweets, and I have a few other ideas to try out. I’m also open to suggestions, as long as they don’t involve too much work. If you have suggestions, go to my blog johnquiggin.com and post them there, once I’ve put this message up.
Best wishes
John
So, we finally joined the 21st Century and got Netflix. We are watching House of Cards (US version), an episode most nights. Based on one season per year of time passed in the show, that’s about four weeks of dystopian fantasy per night. But, when we wake up in the morning, the day’s news almost always has more and crazier stuff packed into it than that, with subplots and story arcs being passed over for lack of space ( will the emoluments clause come back to bite Trump? did he suggest that Comey should imprison journalists? Who can keep track of it all).
Looking at the main plotline of Season 1, what would it take for life to imitate art and elevate Pence to the White House? There’s clearly no likelihood that the House Repubs will impeach Trump as long as they still hope to push through a big tax cut for corporations (which apparently depends, for arcane procedural reasons, on passing some kind of repeal of Obamacare). As Liam Donovan says in Politico
The criticisms may grow louder with each unforced error by the White House, but as long as the legislative dream is still alive it’s hard to imagine any sort of full-scale break. If that dream dies, however, it’s every man for himself.
But maybe this really is a house of cards. Suppose that three Republican Senators defected to the Democrats. That would kill the dream, at which point lots of Republicans might start thinking that a fresh start with Pence would offer them a better chance of survival in 2018. And, hey, they got Gorsuch. Once a dozen or so jumped, it would indeed by sauve qui peut for the rest.
It’s easy to name two Repub Senators (McCain and Collins) for whom it would make personal and political sense to switch sides. Given two, there must surely be a third. Still, I can’t see it happening any time soon. On the other hand, every day brings a new humiliation. Perhaps someone will find a hidden reserve of decency, or just frustration, and say that enough is enough.
I’ve never been a fan of Senator David Leyonjhelm, but even so, I find it hard to believe he made the mindbogglingly absurd statement attributed to him by today’s Oz. Accusing Bill Shorten of a $1.85 billion black hole in relation to his policy of keeping the levy on high-income earners,
But Liberal Democratic senator David Leyonhjelm yesterday called out the Labor costings as disingenuous. He said it was “misleading budgeting” because Labor had no way of extending the deficit levy from opposition.
Say what? On this basis, no Opposition should ever announce policy of any kind. And of course, that goes many times over for members of fringe parties that have no chance of ever forming a government. I’ll be interested to see if he claims to have been misquoted.
Regardless, Leyonjhelm is one of a stream of regrettable politicians to be drawn from the ranks of the Institute of Public Affairs (IIRC, some even worse possibilities were derailed by racist indiscretions on social media). I won’t name names, instead repeating my possibly unhelpful endorsement of Chris Berg as the only person associated with the IPA for whom I have any intellectual respect.
What proportion of Australian voters regularly attend church and identify as Labor voters? How many of those are social conservatives in the mould of, say, Joe de Bruyn? If I’ve interpreted this piece by Crikey’s Pollbludger correctly, the answer to the first question is about 4 per cent. The relevant bits
This is partly reflected by the long-term decline in religious observance, with the proportion of respondents who attended services at least once a month falling from 23% in 1990 to 17% last year.
….
Of still greater interest is a pattern over the past decade in which the observant have grown more pronounced in their identification with the Coalition rather than Labor, with the gap reaching a new peak of 52% to 25% in the 2016 survey.
25 per cent of 17 per cent is 4.25 per cent.
Turning to the second question, I’d be surprised if socially progressive observant Christians (and members of other religious) didn’t account for 5 per cent of the total population of Australia. So, if Labor gets the support of half of those, that would leave less than 2 per cent of the population in the religious conservative Labor voting category. That’s comparable to the support for the HEMP (pro sex, pro marijuana) party in the last Senate election.
As promised, I’ve started a weekly email (over the fold). If you would like to be on the recipient list, email me at [email protected]
If you asked to be added, but haven’t got it, try emailing me again, or commenting here.
At the suggestion of Hall Greenland, I’m planning to start a weekly email, with links to stuff I’ve written, and odd bits of news. If anyone would like to receive it, please email me at [email protected]
Among the 29 people to hold the office of Prime Minister in Australia, Paul Keating is probably the one with the sharpest intellect[1]. So, his abandonment of market liberalism is worth noting.
Among the measures in last night’s budget was the decision to kill off, once and for all, more than $10 billion of “zombie measures”. These cuts proposed in Joe Hockey’s disastrous 2014 Budget, rejected by the Senate, but kept on the books as proposed savings until now.
More importantly, the Budget abandons the undead ideology of market liberalism (aka economic rationalism, neoliberalism and so on) that dominated policy thinking in Australia in the decades leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, and continued to be taken for granted by most of the political class long after that.
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It’s now pretty clear that renewables can replace fossil fuels in their main uses, electricity generation and land transport, at a very modest cost or, as appears to be the case for electricity, with a cost saving. But that still leaves room for doubt over whether the economy can be fully decarbonized in time to hold CO2 concentrations to 450 ppm or below. Among the big gaps are air and sea transport.
I’ve tended to argue on the basis of the idea of induced innovation that, since there are plenty of possible options, at least one will work out, given some incentives to reduce CO2 emissions. That’s proved true for electricity (solar and PV worked, while other promising contenders like geothermal and Gen III nuclear haven’t), and more recently for storage. But it doesn’t seem to satisfy everyone.
So, I was struck to realize that drones (which I’ve always thought of either as toys or as particularly nasty weapons systems) may be on the way to displacing a good deal of air and sea freight transport in the relatively near future. Initially at least, the bigger ones are likely to use conventional engines, but with greatly reduced fuel costs, as with this proposal. But it’s easy to imagine a version that carries its own solar PV system being developed in the future – possibly slower but even cheaper than the current verison.
Moreover, the size and capacity of battery-driven electric drones is increasing all the time. The current leader appears to be the Griff 300, which can (as the name indicates) lift 300kg, including its own weight of about 65 kg. Apparently there is a Griff 800 either released or in the works. At least to my understanding, there’s no fundamental scaling limit here, although there will obviously be plenty of technical challenges. On the other hand, with batteries getting lighter every year, performance can be improved over time without any significant change in design.
None of this deals with passenger air travel which looms larger in the culture wars over energy policy that its objective significance as a source of emissions justifies. But again, in the absence of fundamental limits (the kind that apply, for example, to carbon capture and storage), a sufficiently strong incentive will in all probability bring forth a solution.
A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
In response to discussions about freedom of speech, particularly at university campuses, I started thinking about the question of heckling a speaker, and to what extent this is, or ought to be, protected by advocates of freedom of speech. I assumed that the correct formulation (both legally in the US context and in terms of what is appropriate) is the one attributed to Nat Hentoff
“First Amendment law is clear that everyone has the right to picket a speaker, and to go inside a hall and heckle him or her—but not to drown out the speaker, let alone rush the stage and stop the speech before it starts
It turns out, however, that Hentoff was wrong, as shown by the case of the Irvine 11.
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To misquote Benjamin Franklin and others, the only certainties in economic life are debt and taxes. Among the themes of political struggle, fights over debt (demands from creditors to be paid in the terms they expect, and from debtors to be relieved from unfair burdens) and taxes (who should pay them and how should the resulting revenue be spent) have always been central.
I mentioned in a comment at Crooked Timber recently, that Pro-debtor politics is always in competition with social democracy, and a couple of people asked for more explanation.
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Here’s a piece I wrote in the Guardian responding to Scott Morrison’s distinction between “good” and “bad” debt. Unfortunately, the comments included plenty of people who are under the impression that, thanks to Modern Monetary Theory, there’s no need for taxes and therefore no need to think about budget balance. That’s wrong, as I explain here, with an endorsement in comments from leading MMT economist, Warren Mosler.
Submission’s to the government’s review of climate change policy close on Friday (so there’s still time to send one to [email protected], even if it’s just “Stop Adani”). It’s obvious to everyone now, including the government, that energy and climate policy are in a complete mess. So, there must be some chance of a radical change, possibly even one for the better. And there are plenty of options on the table.
I just put in a very short submission, which is below.
Submission
The terms of reference for this review refer to the government’s commitment to addressing climate change and to ensuring the adoption of effective policies. However, these supposed commitments are contradicted by the government’s failure to respond, as legally required, to the Special Review of Australia’s Climate Goals and Policies, undertaken at the current government’s request by the Climate Change Authority.
The final report of this Review was delivered to the government on 31 August 2016. Under the relevant legislation, the Minister was required to table the government’s response to the recommendations of the Review within six months, that is, by 28 February 2017. This requirement has been ignored.
I was a Member of the Authority until March 2017. I resigned when it became apparent that the government had no intention of responding to, or otherwise taking account of, the comprehensive Special Review in which I had taken part.
The absence of any response reflects the inability of the government to offer a coherent alternative to the policy toolkit recommended by the CCA. The current review should adopt the recommendations of the CCA Special Review, particularly including the introduction of an emissions intensity scheme for the electricity sector.
John Quiggin
Professor of Economics, University of Queensland
Former Member, Climate Change Authority
This submission is made in a private capacity and should not be assumed to represent the views of the University of Queensland or the Climate Change Authority
Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
Continuing on the multimedia theme, I did a video presentation for the TAFE section of the Australian Education Union a few weeks ago. I’ve always been keen on this as an alternative to air travel, and I got great help from the multimedia people in our faculty, but I’m still not sure how best to make use of this.
The videofile is here, but it’s 640 Mb, so I don’t suppose many people will want to download it. What’s the best way to distribute it so that lots of people can get access?
Update: Thanks to reader Peter Bayley a 58Mb version is now up on YouTube
That’s the title of a podcast I did recently. University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis has a regular podcast called The Policy Shop, and he was talking to me and Judith Sloan. That might have been a recipe for a slanging match, given that we don’t agree on much, but it actually worked pretty well.
Westpac’s announcement of a new policy that appears to exclude funding for the development of mines in the Galilee Basin appears likely to sound the death knell for Adani’s proposed Carmichael Mine and rail line. Westpac was the last of the four big Australian banks to announce such a policy. It joins at least 17 global banks, notably including Standard Chartered, which had previously been a major source of finance for Adani
In these circumstances, the proposed $900 million loan from the government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility would involve a high risk of loss, and would therefore be an improper use of public funds. The same is true, admittedly to a lesser extent, of the rival proposal for a rail line put forward by Aurizon (the privatised business formerly known as Queensland Rail).
But if the NAIF doesn’t fund coal railways, how should its resources be allocated? And, what about the jobs promised by the Adani project that will not now be created? Obviously, these two problems are inter-related.
On the evidence of Adani’s own experts, the Carmichael project would create around 1000 jobs (despite this, the discredited figure of 10 000 jobs continues to be touted). So, the proposed NAIF loan would involve an investment of nearly $1 million of public money for every new job created. It shouldn’t be too hard to match that.
But what’s really needed is an alternative to the outdated developmentalism that has characterized not only the Adani proposal but the whole idea of a Northern Australia policy. What are the real economic and social needs of the people of the region, including indigenous people, who are directly affected by the Adani proposal? I’m planning more work on this soon.
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Looking at the Turnbull government’s move to limit gas exports, I can’t do better than quote Bernard Keane in Crikey (paywalled, but here’s the bit that matters)
A while back I suggested Turnbull had been “mugged by reality” on energy policy. But he’s far from the only one. All of us who have advocated free markets and the primacy of the private sector in delivering essential services have copped the same mugging; now we need to accept that liberalisation has dramatically failed in energy. A mystifyingly complex market was designed for private sector operators with the intent of freeing up government capital and driving greater efficiency. And while the Coalition’s climate denialism created investor uncertainty that proved a key factor in the crisis, it’s the relentless opportunism of industry players to game the system and exploit every opportunity to jack up prices, and Santos’ truly spectacular bungling, that has led to this. As you sow, so shall you reap. Back to hardline regulation.
I was in the minority in a recent economists poll on this topic, supporting gas reservation, though not with any great enthusiasm. My statement
Energy policy in Australia is a mess. Prices don’t reflect economic or climatic costs. Availability of some low-cost gas would obviously improve the situation here, in particular allowing an adjustment away from coal. I don’t know whether the opportunity cost of forgoing overseas sales is accurately reflected by the export price.
The policy announced by the Turnbull government amounts to a partial nationalisation, since the government has taken control of our gas reserves back from the supposed private owners. But it’s a half-baked and half-hearted step. What we need is properly national, publicly owned energy grid, in which the role of private ownership is to fill gaps left by the public.
Reading about the UK National Grid recently, I came across the interesting concept of demand turn up. Unlike the usual form of demand side management, where users are paid to cut usage in periods of excess demand, demand turn up involves making small payments to users willing to increase demand when the supply from renewables exceeds demand.
This looks strange at first sight, but it simply reflects the fact that, once the capacity is installed, the marginal cost of renewable electricity is zero. In the short run, taking account of the costs of shutdown and startup, the marginal cost of electricity from an operating renewable generation source is negative*.
So, demand turn up is just an application of marginal cost pricing, the same as off-peak pricing for coal-fired power.
The broader point is that claims that the electricity supply system must have a large component of coal-fired to meet “baseload demand” reflects the assumption that the system must meet the demands generated by a pricing system set up for coal (or nuclear which is broadly similar).
For my Anzac Day post today, I’ll quote the man most directly responsible for the disaster, describing the war of which it was a part (H/T Daniel Quiggin)
Germany having let Hell loose kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals often on a greater scale and longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines; the dead moldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered, often slowly, in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian states had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.
As it turned out, even this assessment was too optimistic. The second phase of the great world war saw the end of the few limits that had been observed in the first.
To pay respect to the Anzacs and those who followed them, we should stop repeating the mistakes and crimes of those who sent them to their deaths.
Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’ve been on holiday over Easter, going to the National Folk Festival in Canberra, which is why I haven’t posted for a while. One thing that struck me during my break was the Easter editorial in the Oz. In place of the usual vague pieties, it was a full-scale blast of Christianism, demanding that Australians respect the specifically Christian nature of the holiday. This was followed up by Nikki Savva (not someone who has ever struck me as showing any religious feeling) denouncing Bill Shorten for desecrating this sacred holiday with mundane politics.
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The other day my incoming email included an invitation from an Olla Galal, special issue developer at Hindawi publishers, to be the Lead Guest Editor for a Special Issue of Occupational Therapy International. Nothing too surprising in that, although my knowledge of occupational therapy would barely extend to a paraphrase of the name. I’m always getting invitations like this, and while I had the impression that Hindawi was a cut above the kind of predatory publishing house that does this kind of thing, I wasn’t too sure. (I have received previous invitations of this kind from them, but in fields where I could at least be a plausible candidate.
What made me pay attention was this
In June 2016, Wiley and Hindawi entered into a new publishing partnership that converted nine Wiley subscription journals into Open Access titles. The journals will be published under both the Wiley and Hindawi brands and distributed through Hindawi’s online platform
So, if this is accurate, I could become a guest editor for a Wiley journal in a field in which I am totally unqualified. More seriously, authors of papers in the old version of Occupational Therapy International “very well respected in its field with an impact factor of 0.683” according to Olla Galal, will now be associated with the new one.
Having got this far, I thought I should check Beall’s list of predatory journals, only to discover that it went dark on 17 January* for unexplained reasons. This is certainly depressing. It seems that even supposedly reputable academic publishers are now engaged, with only the fig leaf of a “partnership”, in seriously predatory behavior. How long before we see them pandering to the demand for “alternative fact” journals to give proper credibility to creationism, climate science denial, antivax and so on, if they are not already?
* Only a couple of days before Trump’s inauguration. Coincidence?
Ted Trainer, with whom I’ve had a number of debates in the past, has sent me an interesting piece claiming that “no empirical or historical evidence that demonstrates that [100 per cent renewables” systems are in fact feasible”. The authors, at least those of whom I’m aware, are “pro-nuclear environmentalists” (Ben Heard, Barry Brook, Tom Wigley and CJ Bradshaw) The central premise is that, given that renewables won’t work, and reductions in energy demand are unrealistic, we need to get cracking on nuclear (and also carbon capture and sequestration).
It’s paywalled, but the abstract is sufficient to get the main point. In fact, the whole piece is summarized by its title “Burden of Proof”. To give the shorter version: Unless every possible detail of a 100 per cent renewable system can be proved to be workable decades in advance, we must go nuclear.
The longer version is in these paras from the abstract
Strong empirical evidence of feasibility must be demonstrated for any study that attempts to construct or model a low-carbon energy future based on any combination of low-carbon technology.
The criteria are: (1) consistency with mainstream energy-demand forecasts; (2) simulating supply to meet demand reliably at hourly, half-hourly, and five-minute timescales, with resilience to extreme climate events; (3) identifying necessary transmission and distribution requirements; and (4) maintaining the provision of essential ancillary services.
This list is mostly notable for what’s not in it: adequate year-round power supplies, at an economically feasible cost. That’s because it’s now obvious that solar PV and wind, combined with one of a number of storage technologies (solar thermal, batteries, pumped hydro) and a bit of smart pricing, can deliver these goals. So, instead we get demands for the precise details in the list above. To lift the burden of proof a bit more, it’s not good enough to address them separately, they all have to be done at once in a single study. Unsurprisingly, no one has yet produced a study that meets all of these demands at once.*
And this is where the burden of proof works so brilliantly. Renewable technologies are well established, with annual installations of 100 GW a year a more, and a record of steadily falling costs. But, according to our authors, they haven’t met the burden of proof, so we have to put tens of billions of dollars into technologies that are either purely conceptual (Gen IV nuclear) or hopelessly uneconomic on the basis of current experience (CCS and generation II/III nuclear).
To be fair, this use of the burden of proof, while more blatant than usual, is very common. One any policy issue, most of us would like to compare an idealised model of our preferred solution with the worst case scenario (or, at best, the messy and unsatisfactory reality) for the alternatives. But it’s important to avoid this temptation as much as possible. On any realistic assessment, renewables + storage (with the path to 100 per cent smoothed by gas) offer a far more plausible way of decarbonizing electricity generation than nuclear or CCS>
Clarification: In comments, Ben Heard points out that the authors counted two publications from closely related studies together.
A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. As an example, alternative theories about the gas attack in Syria belong here.
Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
One of the few points on which I agreed with Donald Trump during the election campaign was on his statements to the effect that the US should not get involved in Middle Eastern wars. Of course, Trump being Trump, he made the contradictory promise to “have a plan to defeat ISIS within 30 days.” (There some ambiguity as to whether the 30 days was the time taken to produce the plan, or whether he already had the plan and would have ISIS beaten in 30 days. As of day 78, it scarcely matters). But one point that came across reasonably clearly was that Trump wasn’t going to do anything about removing Bashir Assad from power, and was going to increase co-operation with Putin, Assad’s patron.
All that has now gone by the board, but it is unclear what is going to replace it. Following the horrific poison gas attack a few days ago[1], Trump responded in thoroughly Trumpish fashion. His missile attack was big enough to mark a clear, and possibly irreversible, escalation of US involvement, but not big enough to have any military effect. A day after their airbase was attacked, Syrian Air Force planes were flying out of it to launch more strikes against their opponents.
I don’t have a solution to the current mess other than the Irish advice “if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here[2]”. But, at least I now have the cognitive consistency of knowing there is now no policy issue of importance on which I agree with Trump.[3]
fn1. Very probably, though not certainly, undertaken by Assad’s regime. I don’t want to be derailed by this and will delete, with prejudice, any comments seeking to ventilate alternative theories.
fn2. Obvious wrong turnings on the way to where we are start with the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1915 and go all the way to the Iraq war.
fn3. I was happy that he refused to sign TPPA. But it’s now clear he’s pursuing the standard corporate agenda on trade, including ISDS and strong IP.
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