Open Thread 8 – BNC Christmas and New Year 2011

Peter,Don’t get too enthusiastic about the prognostications of Anna Bligh.As a Queenslander I am only too well aware of the slippery nature of the Beattie/Bligh government.You may have noticed from the the article you linked to that there are a lot of ifs,buts and maybes.
To put it quite succinctly,I don’t trust the bitch any further than I could kick her.

Anyway,thanks for your efforts,Barry.I suspect that 2011 will be a very interesting year,probably in ways that won’t please a lot of people.

BTW,my resident Podargus,having presented the two new additions to their family to me in an Ironbark about 20 metres in front of my verandah,are now gadding about their territory in ways inaccessable to my 500mm telephoto lens.
Never mind,they’ll be back.

Cheers – Glen Daly

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You never know what to believe with politicians:

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/happy-to-talk-but-no-to-nuclear-bligh-20101224-19766.html

Interesting to note this quote by Anna Bligh:

In Queensland we have an act of parliament that prohibits any nuclear facilities in (the state) and… would require a referendum (to change it).

Unless the nuclear ban is constitutionally entrenched (which it almost certainly isn’t), talk of needing a referendum is absolute rubbish.

You also never know who to believe in the media. The Australian and the SMH gave vastly different accounts of the story.

I only hope Peter’s optimism reflects the true direction Labor are heading – but I’m sceptical for now.

Happy holidays to all :)

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Have a great break (not long bones, you know what I mean ;-)

Mark Addinall

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Thank you Barry for this site and your work. Thanks also to all the posters and commentors. I’m learning a lot about energy, the energy business, and energy politics here and through the linked sites. All the best for all in 2011!

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And like many others (as I said on the other thread) I salute Barry and all those who have made this site such a success in educating the public on the key issues surrounding climate change and/or the responses available to us.

May you all keep safe over the season and enjoy good health and good cheer.

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Merry Christmas everyone. Here’s hoping for a positive and productive year to come.

It sounds promising…

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I’m going to send a copy of my letter to Combet, Ferguson, Swan, Paul Howes to Bligh which insists that nuclear power for Australia be put on the convention agenda next year. All of you other bloggers, please send a request as well. And don’t pull your punches. It’s time for Australia to wake up and join the rest of the world as it races towards greater nuclear power generation. Happy Christmas everyone and thanks Barry for your great efforts.

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I think that BNC is not the appropriate site for acrimonious bickering about climate change.
My impression is that most of the commenters here accept the science.Those few who are sceptical do realize the urgency of removing coal fired electricity generation from Australia.The present system is plainly not sustainable for various reasons.

We have a very large task ahead in convincing the leadership and the citizenry of the necessity for change.This is a double barrel task.I suspect that this is an issue where the leadership,public and private, is too timid or self interested to take the lead in what most of us know is the right direction.

The citizenry are going to have to lead and that is a big ask when the problem,to the average Joe & Jill,doesn’t appear to have much,if any,urgency.

I don’t know what is best way of tackling this problem and I would be interested in hearing the opinions of others.

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Tom Bond,
I suggest you finish high school before making comment.

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Speaking as someone who has engaged with Mr Addinall oin usenet for some years, and you knows his posting-style and drivers well, he is someone who likes flames. In fact, many of his responses to me over there were corssposted to a uesent group called “aus.flame”. The entire purpose of that group was to permit people so disposed to flame each other.

Addinall is not a fool, but his principal drivers are hatred of anything one could associate with the Greens, environmentalism and soft liberalism on the one hand, and what may be called “big stuff” and “big systems” on the other. Nuclear power ticks both those boxes. For the record though, he is in favour of burning/selling all of Australia’s hydrocarbons. Both policies fit the Addinall requirements — big [engineering] and annoying Greens and soft liberals/lefties. His style is the sweeping declarative statement, sometimes including copy and pasted uncommented text from some place he has dug up on the internet.

On more than one occasion he has addressed me over in usenet as “a stupid bint”. On one occasion he even accused me of trying to ruin his access to the internet and threatened vengeance. He is, let us be polite as Barry suggests, an eccentric.

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Podgarus,

My impression is that most of the commenters here accept the science. Those few who are sceptical do realize the urgency of removing coal fired electricity generation from Australia. The present system is plainly not sustainable for various reasons.

I wouldn’t want to be misunderstood. I want:

1. sustainable economic growth for all regions of the world at the fastest possible pace with minimum boom-bust amplitude

2. free trade

3. long term energy security

4. reliable, high quality energy supply

5. least cost energy

6. improving health, safety and environmental impacts of energy supply and use

Global warming consequences of fossil fuel use is just one of the impacts and it must be kept in proper perspective with all the others.

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Fran,

I agree with your caveat.

However, I how that can and should the developed countries impose their beliefs on the developing countries. If they want economic growth, who are we to say no, we know better and you shall do as we say?

We cannot expect developing economies to have the same standards as we’d expect in developed countries. So there must be a progressive transition in implementing the protections and benefits, perhaps roughly in line with the growing GDP of the growing economy. After all, our protections and benefits have improved as we developed and will continue to improve as we continue to develop. So the same will happen in the developing countries.

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Fran,

If you require all that nothing will be done.

Regulation can do more harm than good. Forcing western beliefs on developing countries can slow growth and cause hardship to be maintained for much longer as a result than if the growth had been allowed.

A parallel can be drawn with what the activism which lead to excessive regulation has done to slow the development and implementation of nuclear energy over the past 40 years. The result is that nuclear energy is far more expensive than it would otherwise have been and implementation effectively stopped in the developing countries. This means GHG emissions are some 20% higher than they would have been and will continue to be some 20% higher for decades than they would have been had the do-gooders not managed to slow the development of nuclear. There are many other examples of where the do-gooders with their bright ideas have done so much harm. Regulations requiring bio-diesel, resulting in deforestation of equatorial forests, and banning DDT come to mind.

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And for the record, ecroachments by cattle ranchers and those wanting timber, and ool for pharmaceutiocal products and confectionery, have done far more than biofuels ever could to harm equatorial forests. This too is an old canard.

This is not, of course, an argument for resort to biofuels, each of which ought to be evaluated for its technical, environmental, financial, schedule and operational feasibility.

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The point is that the do-gooders keep on insisting that their beliefs be imposed on societies …(their own and others),

The do gooders are typically part of those societies, though we tend to hear more from those who speak our language since they tend to be easier to quote in our English-language press. In societies where there is nothing like democracy or a civil society, to speak of westerners imposing their mores on developing societies is just a cynical apologia for inequity, dressed in the finery of developing world empowerment. The local elites who run those places are not entitled to speak with impunity about what “their” people need as they often have a serious conflict of interest.

Moreover, human rights are universal. We cannot say that they are right here and frivolous in another jurisdiction.

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Fran,

You are missing the point. Just as stopping development of nuclear has resulted in higher costs and higher emisisons now and for a long time to come, so too would imposing the endless list of restrictions you and your ilk would like to impose on companies trying to establish industries in developing countries. Restricting free trade is one of the worst things we could do.

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Addinall – your foul mouth won’t change the (to you) unpallatable fact that humans are causing this current warming. The answer to your inane question as to where it is warmer is – WORLDWIDE, OVERALL TEMPERATURE. If you choose not to accept the NASA figures and the overwhelming scientific evidence, that is your prerogative but, it doesn’t make your OPINION any more than that – your UNVALIDATED opinion.
Peter – I also agree with most the points you made, except, I am with Fran 100% regarding working conditions etc. Nothing excuses ill-treatment of children and the working poor who had few options – not even increasing the profit line. I urge you to read the social history of England during the Industrial Revolution and challenge you not to be touched by the dreadful plight of the working class or appalled by the grasping greed of the already wealthy employers.

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Fran,

I’ve been thinking some more about the requirements you would impose on developing countries to allow them to participate in “free” trade. Would your require that they:

1. impose a carbon price?
2. don’t eat meat?
3. depopulate
4. don’t have sex
5. have anti-pornography bars on their internet connections

What other ideals would you require before you would allow “free” trade?

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Ms Perps,

I don’t understand what you are referring to when you say “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”.

However, I think, like Fran, you probably have little understanding of the consequences of the restrictions you would like to impose.

Consider what you think is a “fair days work for a fair days pay”, and consider how everyone else would want to impose their beliefs and think where this would lead. There would be no “free trade”. Everyone would be wanting to impose their values on others (within their own country and everywhere else). That is what the Greens want to do now through ever tightening regulations, restrictions and expansion of the “nanny state”.

Can’t you see where this would lead if it was allowed to get started at all. Everyone would want to impose on the developing country their own strongly held beliefs.

The only way is to have totally free trade. The development will come and all the other benefits will follow, including democracy, improved governance and all else you are wanting to impose as a condition of free trade. But if you impose your excessive requirements at the start, there will be no development, or at least, its pace will be slowed over what it could be.

Regarding “treat others as you would expect to be treated”, I agree. But it’s a real pitty that tose of your persuasion don’t police that amongst yourselves. That would be a really good start. Once that is demonstrated, I’ll believe it is actually going to happen. I think you, like most, love serving it up but don’t like the response.

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Outright personal abuse and use of foul language, is usually the refuge of the morally and intellectually bankrupt. …

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Peter Lang and Fran Barlow:

You both agree with each other about how you would like the future to unfold. Essentially, you would wish those in Third World and Developing Nations to attain living standards comparable with those in Developed Nations without significant detriment to the living standards of the latter. You differ only in the degree of laissez faire that should be allowed in your well-intentioned and benign, but idealised, future wish lists.

Your imagined future may just be possible in the absence of energy constraint, in the absence of any adverse impacts of using the vastly greater amounts of energy that will be needed in the future you hope for and on the assumption that global population will stabilise or fall in consequence of the hoped for increase in living standards.

Perhaps, a massive and rapid nuclear roll-out will achieve what you hope for. Little else currently seems to offer the remotest chance. If we don’t go with the approach that you both seem to want (nuclear) as fast as is needed to prevent energy constraint, what then? The universality of human rights will surely come to be seen as a noble, ideological and idealistic abstraction of the uniquely human mind which cannot hold up when the more primal directive of survival of the fittest begans to gain ground.

I am asking you both to imagine a future in which human survival, let alone quality of life, depends upon access to adequate resources. After all, this is what has always been the norm for populations of non domesticated species and, until the advent of modern agriculture and subsequently fossil fuels, was the case for man.

I would ask you the somewhat cliqued question of your responses to being marooned on a lifeboat with limited rations. I think Fran might be happy to follow a fair share policy that eventually led to the lingering deaths of all, because, as Peter says, she seems to be a genuine do-gooder (and none the worse for it). Peter, however, appears to pride himself as a realist/pragmatist. I can only suppose, therefore, that his promotion of free trade is based upon a lack of imagination that energy (and, in consequence, all other resources) will ever become so constrained as to threaten the survival of his own genes. It may, of course, be attributable to a failure to acknowledge that peak oil and the adverse consequences of AGW will be of major significance.

I am in no way attempting to make moral judgements. In fact, I am somewhat bewildered as to the optimum path forward. However, I remain sufficiently alarmed about future prospects to advocate a crash programme of nuclear roll-out (the war footing approach) as our best hope. I don’t think Peter’s free market advocacy will provide a timely solution. This is not a left/right issue. Rather, it is one that depends upon one’s judgement of the magnitude and acuteness of the problems we face.

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Amen

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Douglas Wise,

Your post contains the usual patronising stuff I am so used to receiving from you. But from my perspective it is simply based on the usual arguments based on propogating fear of catastrophe, armageddon, appolcaypse etc that many scams and religions depend on.

I am asking you both to imagine a future in which human survival, let alone quality of life, depends upon access to adequate resources.

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Oh yea! We’ve been through this a dozen time before. Yawn!

If we can’t focus on making substantive progress in the next year, five years and ten years what is the point in fretting over what will be the case many decades hence. The same silly arguments that you are using have been used for the past 40 years to block nuclear, promote renewable energy, block free trade, promote bio-fuels and the resulting deforestation, ban DDT and cause tens of millions of deaths, and promote Kyoto, ETS and carbon taxes. Note all these are policies pushed by the Left; all are symbolic gestures, none are economically rational and all have done enormous damage.

Douglas Wise, you must have missed this post, https://bravenewclimate.com/2010/01/31/alternative-to-cprs/#comment-109486 or else you didn’t get it or don’t want to.

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Douglas Wise

You differ only in the degree of laissez faire that should be allowed in your well-intentioned and benign, but idealised, future wish lists.

Rubbish. We differ in that Fran is promoting her Marxist dogma and I am trying to explain to those that want to listen what is pragmatic and proven by history to be achievable. If you don’t understand by now that free trade is good and protectionsim and excessive regulation and socialism (like UK and Europe) is bad, then there is little point in trying to discuss this – as we have found in many discussion on BNC over the past year or more.

Craig Emerson, Minister for Trade, argues that free trade should be implemented and it should be free of all other agendas. I agree.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/labor-plots-free-trade-revolution/story-fn59niix-1225968580715

Craig Emerson’s recent speech:
http://www.trademinister.gov.au/speeches/2010/ce_sp_101210.html

The point, dear Fran, Ms Perps and Douglas Wise, is that we need free trade, with no connections to trying to impose our beliefs on other countries through trade. If you want to argue for this, why not simply invade the other country and impose your beliefs that way?

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Douglas says:

I would ask you the somewhat cliched question of your responses to being marooned on a lifeboat with limited rations. I think Fran might be happy to follow a fair share policy that eventually led to the lingering deaths of all, because, as Peter says, she seems to be a genuine do-gooder {typo corrected: FB}

Granting the constraints, yes, though, if one entered the lifeboat with a calorie surfeit, what was fair sharing might vary! In extremis, what is fair is what people need.

Of course, Earth has a lot more possibility than a lifeboat. We can easily contrive resources that people in lifeboats can’t.

This is not a left/right issue. Rather, it is one that depends upon one’s judgement of the magnitude and acuteness of the problems we face

It shouldn’t be a left-right issue, but regrettably, the beggar-my-neighbour impulse if common on the right. It should be about what serves humanity as a whole, and that which underpins the wellbeing of those of us least well placed. For a variety of reasons (some of them obvious), the right tend to be less motivated by such concerns.

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Peter said:

we need free trade, with no connections to trying to impose our beliefs on other countries through trade. If you want to argue for this, why not simply invade the other country and impose your beliefs that way

Again, petitio principii [I am not trying to impose [my/our] beliefs.on other countries. I’m trying to underpin rights recognised as universally applicable since WW2 and supported within thoise societies by those who are disempowered.

There’s nothing simple, (much less dispositive of net utility) about invading another country. The history of the last 2 decades attests to that.

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It makes you wonder why we should pay a premium price for a disappointing product like summer wind power. That premium is RECs, FiT, soft loans, whatever.

Note that Florida’s manatees seek warmth in the cooling water of a thermal power plant
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12087311

I recall some have suggested air cooled mini NPPs for example at Olympic Dam. However air cooled coal plant like Kogan Ck and Milmerran Qld have a hot weather cooling option – they spray river water on the outside of the radiator. What happens when there is no river?

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Fran :

You state that a “beggar my neighbour” impulse is common among those on the Right. I suppose that this may be how those on the Left choose to caricature things. I would suggest that beggaring one’s neighbour might be an interpretation of placing primacy on the interests of self and fellow tribal members. I could respond that you ought to know where good intentions (so prevalent among the Left) lead to, but you might respond that you don’t believe in hell! Anyway, it is very refreshing to be able to have a rational debate with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum. For this reason, I thought I’d raise a couple of somewhat tangential issues for your consideration:

1) There is a species of small mammal which lives in an environment subject to sudden changes every few years. Researchers were very surprised to learn that there were, within the population, two distict “personality” types (actually determined largely by brain and behavioural responses to adrenal hormones) which were co-dominant. In stable conditions, the non fearful “happy go lucky” confident individuals were preponderant. However, roles were reversed in periods of environmental change at which time timidity became a selective advantage.

2) I recently read in my newspaper that researchers had discovered anatomical characteristics in the human brain that allowed them to predict likely Left/Right voting patterns. Conservatives had larger amygdalas and differences in cingulate areas – structures related to fear responses.

I have noted in the UK that our Left leaning governments tend to expand the welfare state to the extent that economic disaster looms and the “nasty” party is then called in to attempt to fix things, not necessarily successfully. Thus, the ungrateful tail returns to wag the dog. I suspect that a liberal democracy with its attendant welfare state is a luxury that can only exist in times of plenty. I also believe that a state that allows its individual citizens to enrich themselves by exporting capital and technological know-how may be placing itself in a weakened position relative to one that does not.

If I were to suggest that your beliefs were those of the happy go lucky small mammal and mine were reflected by the behaviour of the timid co-dominant, i would conclude that my time in the ascendency could be about to happen. I draw no comfort or feelings of moral or intellectual superiority from this conclusion. It is merely one that I am driven towards as a biologist with some little understanding of human and animal brains and knowledge of how things work in the natural world where survival of the fittest rules and universality of rights is an unknown concept.

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The Alberta Oil Sands are simply the worst thing that has happened to Canada. It has become the 800lbs gorilla in the energy debate in this country. The politics, of course, are as dirty as the product, and it is making it almost impossible to effectively push for the required legislation to bring the sector under control.

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seth,

You have possibly already seen it, but Barry has commented on Jacobson here:

Critique of ‘A path to sustainable energy by 2030’

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The Haiyan “nuclear city” now has it’s own English language web site.

http://www.chinahed-nuclear.com/

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gc in which of the last 10,000 years was the seven billionth live human born? That seven billionth human who begins life in 2011 will need food, shelter, a job and personal mobility. Those needs were easier to satisfy thousands of years ago.

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Podargus:

I essentially agree with your analysis. However, I was somewhat surprised that you dumped me along with Fran in the progressive camp! I’m not sure that Fran would welcome me as a bedfellow.

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Fran:

You suggest that I draw inappropriate lessons from studies of non human animals. You may well be right. I have spent considerable time thinking about the extent to which humans have been able to distance themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. Do we really and, uniquely in the animal kingdom, have free will? How much of our brain is hard wired in a manner similar to those of other animals? There are only small differences between higher non human primate brains and our own (the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex being the most obvious) but great apes are closer to rats than humans in their cognitive ability.

We have obviously gained huge evolutionary advantage through brain evolution. This is, arguably, an advantage based principally upon superior levels of cognition. The concurrent evolution of self consciousness and, with it, a social conscience has been considered by some to be an epiphenomenon – a property co-emerging with the evolutionarily advantageous superior cognition which, itself, has no evolutionary benefit and may have built in disadvantage for species survival in the long term. This is, if true, admittedly all rather depressing, but I think you shouldn’t, for this reason, just dismiss the hypothesis out of hand.

Your social conscience equips you with a strong concept of fairness. We all tend to raise our children to believe in a sense of fair play. Nevertheless, we all know that life is very often not fair at all. In times of plenty, there may well be advantage for social animals to play fair, but is it necessarily going to remain the optimum strategy when resources become limited? Is now the right time to be brainwashing our offspring to be fair? Are the Chinese being fair? They apparently have no wish to share their rare earth minerals with the rest of us. Do you blame them? Should you blame them? I don’t know the answers, but I suspect that you will say you do. You are driven by a strong moral compass which, though not dependent upon belief in a deity, is, nevertheless, quasi-religious. I am not criticising – I have my own moral compass but the needle doesn’t always point in a single direction.

Finally, you surprise me (and, no doubt, would astonish Peter Lang) by suggesting that the UK hasn’t had a left leaning government since 1974. I would define our Labour governments as giving primacy to wealth distribution without sufficient regard to its creation in the first place and Conservatives as having reciprocal policies. Neither party has been particularly successful. I suspect that this may be due to growing scarcity of natural (and particularly energy) resources combined with liberal policies that have enabled a few individuals and companies to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens by exporting capital and technology to nations with cheaper labour. As I am neither an economist nor a politician, I may be being massively naive and totally wrong. If others could point out my logical inconsistencies, I’d be happy – even relieved – to change my currently depressing views.

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Spangled trolled (badly):

GC,

Also, I thought that one of the more interesting statements of the past year by a scientist [ and one of the warming persuasion to boot] was “there has been no statistical warming since 1995″.

For pity’s sake … you can’t even get your troll talking points accurate. If you understand the first thing about statistical significance in climate change measurement, then you can only be recklessly making stuff up.

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Fran Barlow:

As yto your governments since 1974, it seems to me that wealth in the UK throughout this time became less evenly distributed

Indeed so: http://www.poverty.org.uk/09/index.shtml

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quokka,

This is a new work by Jacobson to be published in a reputable journal and needs be properly peer reviewed and retrashed.

Once again.

Providing all Global Energy with Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part I: Technologies, Energy Resources, Quantities and Areas of Infrastructure, and Materials

Click to access WWSEnergyPolicyPtI.pdf

Providing all Global Energy with Wind, Water, and Solar Power, Part II: Reliability, System and Transmission Costs, and Policies

Click to access WWSEnergyPolicyPtII.pdf

Analysis spreadsheet
http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/WWSEnergyPolicy-Spreadsheet.xls “

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“BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Phil Jones: Yes, but only just.”

OK Fran, he didn’t say it, he just agreed but don’t be in denial.

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DV*

With the arguable exception of Spangled, where I took a swing at him misrepresenting Phil Jones in a new iteration of a very cliched piece of denier verballing, I haven’t sniped here at anyone.

Douglas sems to me a worthy and intelligent fellow, despite our politico-cultural differences, and I’ve enjoyed the exchange at least as much as he says he has.

Perhaps you are referring mainly to Peter’s persistent à propos de rien style outbursts?

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Fran – I named no names, but if the shoe fits….

greg meyerson – Newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, are not known for the quality of their epidemiological research under the best conditions, so I would caution anyone from giving such sources too much weight.

As for the health of people in these communities, it has suffered since the middle of last century from a number of agents, including access to the accouterments, and diet of post war America, and acquiring the habits that are responsible for similar health issues in the general population, on several fronts. Unless this effect is controlled for, any concussions over the contribution of radiation is speculative at best.

While

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Tomas Frank
The Wrecking Crew: how conservatives ruined government, enriched themselves, and beggared the nation
Holt Paerbacks/Henry Holt LLC, 2009.

Not acctually conservatives, but the wrecking crew has also been wrecking the mother tongue.

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