This article deals with Federal Coalition Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s election promise to force gas producers to reduce the price of gas for Australian consumers to $10 per gigajoule. However, according to a debate on last night Q &A between Labor Climate Change Minister...

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The possibility of one or more Very Fast Train (VFT) lines for Australia has been debated for more than 40 years, most often being treated as a complete joke. However, perhaps that's about to change. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has long been a supporter of VFT transport fo...

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As I argued in a recent article, the election of Donald Trump as President would be disastrous for climate change compared with the current Democrat administration of President Biden. The situation is quite different in Australia. The election of a Coalition government federal...

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Most people throughout the world (except dedicated right wing American Republicans) are contemplating with horror the very real possibility of Donald Trump being re-elected as American President next week. I share that horror, but not to the rather extreme extent being asserte...

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The federal Coalition's adoption of a policy involving government-owned construction of 7 nuclear power plants around Australia has raised an argument that most people thought was over 30 years ago or more. Labor and the Greens are opposed to it, as are several state Liberal P...

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Labor's May 2022 federal election win seems to confirm the approach taken by US political analyst David Shor. The 1 in 20: Paul Fletcher will become the sole remaining Liberal member in the 20 federal seats with the highest number of people holding postgraduate degrees. I don'...

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Societies are evolving and complex, which often makes it hard to see at any moment where things are going. It was thus with the move of Northern European countries towards democracy in the 19 th century, which seems inevitable and clear in hindsight but blurred at the time by...

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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[caption id="attachment_33274" align="alignright" width="278"] In good bookstores everywhere – at a very reasonable price[/caption] Cross-posted from the Lowy Institute Blog . Instead of munching popcorn at the political theatre, citizens’ assemblies would give the community a...

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In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...

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Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline could upend our thinking about our future of planet Earth with far reaching implications for policy on climate change, immigration and border control, defence, education, child care, and jobs, to name just a few. In the face...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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I'm afraid this post won't live up to the title above. It has its genesis in a long email I wrote someone who told me I just had to read Jeremy Lend's critique of 'Enlightenment Now' . I've mainly just topped and tailed it and stuck it up here – very much FWIW. I’ll pass I’m a...

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One of the best pieces of scientific news the last decades has been the spectacular improvements in solar energy generation. The current world price was set in 2017 when the Dubai government bought a large future solar contract for 7.3 US cents per Kilowatt Hour, a mere 1/6 th...

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[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="447"] What do we want? Deliberative democracy! When do we want it? NOW!![/caption] This story from this larger study speaks for itself, but is illustrative of some of the themes of my previous post on deliberative democracy. In the spri...

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Hold the presses - Coal may not be good for humanity. OK that was a cheap ideological shot - the kind you might see on our rival ideologically aligned blogs but surely not here at Club Pony. In any event, the graphic above is a remarkable illustration of the long lived effect...

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Geo-engineering is increasingly looking like the only politically viable way of averting temperature rises above 2 degrees in the coming century. This is for three interlocking reasons: i) Any mayor country can try geo-engineering on its own without permission from anyone else...

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But maybe it doesn't matter ... Hardly anyone seemed to notice at last weekend’s G20 meeting in Brisbane that the Climate Emperor had no clothes. Nor did I hear anyone remark on the obvious contradiction involved in issuing a communiqué which simultaneously committed participa...

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Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending by Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller, Jeremy West - #20349 (EEE IO PE) Abstract: Cash for Clunkers was a 2009 economic stimulus program aimed at increasing new vehicle spending by subsidizing the replacement of older vehicles. Us...

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In the last 5 years, I have made a point of giving clear predictions on complex socio-economic issues. I give predictions partially to improve my own understanding of humanity: nothing sharpens the thoughts as much as having to actually predict something. Another reason is as...

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The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer came back into the news on Monday (11 November), with reports [i] on a paper published in Nature Geoscience which finds that reductions in chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) emissions achieved under the Montreal Prot...

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High profile climate un-changer Professor Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun School of Thought Homogeneity, is well known for his contention that the temperature rise of the planet has stopped. He’s been saying it for years. Today, Professor Bolt wrote that a leaked IPCC report con...

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I have just completed a lengthy answer to a very thoughtful comment on my previous post on climate change . And because the raises lots of Very Big issues about how one talks and reasons about ethics, I thought I'd exercise my prerogative and turn the exchange into a post for...

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(Cross-posted at shorewalker.com ) I like trains. For a while when I was a kid, I spent Saturdays clambering around Adelaide's Mile End Railway Museum and most of my pocket money buying items for an elaborate train set. Which may explain how I found myself today reading KPMG's...

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Troppo author and prominent academic economist Paul Frijters has been banging away for years about how current climate change policies (including carbon pricing) are doomed to failure. The sincere (and entirely well founded) concerns of scientists and environmentalists about t...

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I stumbled upon this piece and voted in this online poll. I said I wasn't making any changes to my behaviour as a result of the carbon tax. But most people are! So far so good!

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If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet? According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may hav...

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Brian Bahnisch over at Larvatus Prodeo has a useful summary of the state of play (such as it is) at the current Durban climate change talkfest: China, it seems, wants the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol for the developed countries, and wants them legally bound to deeper cut...

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I recently decided to install an air conditioner in my study. Naturally, caring about the environment (but not enough to forego my comfort) I chose the most energy efficient model on the market (the only 6 star split system).[1] Got a phone call yesterday – the importer is out...

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In light of Paul Frijter's sketpticism about the possibility of co-ordinated international action on carbon emissions and his recent offer of a wager on the outcome of international action, I thought I'd try to put the economic problem into some of the language of Internationa...

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Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy has a post musing about whether carbon emissions trading permits would be regarded as property rights which would entitle the holder to compensation if abolished by a future federal government. The obvious context is the fact that Tony Abbott has...

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Disappointed Troppo readers everywhere have gradually come to a realisation - upon which I came clean on in a recent thread . Troppo is really an 'eyeballs' play as we say in the trade and things haven't been this good for eyeballs since Tim Blair sent some brownshirts our way...

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A major component of the government’s clean energy plan is a package of assistance measures to compensate households for higher prices. The government will provide assistance through increases in pensions, allowances and family payments, as well as through income tax cuts. Fro...

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I reckon this is the most succinct, accurate and balanced summary I've read of the current state of the carbon pricing debate: Pricing carbon in Australia is about pricing carbon, not saving the planet. As an insurance policy, we need to have a soft mechanism in place that can...

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ALAN JONES: Look, it's a harsh thing to say on these matters of carbon tax and global warming and carbon dioxide that your national government is telling you lies. But The Australian newspaper leads today with a story that no major coal-producing country currently imposes a di...

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When I floated the idea of an infographic wiki the other day I said this. The problem of course is that infographics are created by graphic designers, who are trained to do what they do. Someone in the policy crowd might want to offer their knowledge on an issue in an infograp...

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Amongst developed countries, we're nothing special, ranking 51st. This is from the Yale Environmental Performance Index . Though plenty of caveats need to be kept in mind, and the report itself is full of the implicit assumption that everything is always and everywhere better...

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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...

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The latest situation with damaged Japanese nuclear power plants seems if anything more potentially dire and apocalyptic than what prompted my comment on Don Arthur's post : Seems to me that whatever now happens the nuclear power option is almost certainly a dead duck in all we...

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A lot of nonsense is being written by pundits about Julia Gillard's supposedly terminal leadership situation in the light of the carbon tax issue. The reality is that if she manages to broker a deal that gets through Parliament this year, then she'll be seen as a strong leader...

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Three things emerged from qanda last night . The first was that Malcolm Turnbull is out of control, and thinks he can undermine Tony Abbott at will. So there's some fun in store. The other two are closely related. One is that, whatever Bill Shorten learned in his MBA at the Me...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40&feature=player_embedded Christopher Monckton feels we could benefit from a few thoughts of his . . .

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In a piece of news some will regard as predictably disappointing, the Cancun Climate Conference has reached an agreement , but its targets are both non-binding and fairly modest (reputedly a [combined] reduction in emissions of 13-16% by 2020), and include both developed and d...

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John Foster has asked that I post a link to a paper he's recently co-authored (pdf) arguing for a different carbon regulatory regime to promote carbon abatement. I'm travelling and unable to subject the paper to any analysis, but it looks interesting. I hope you'll check it ou...

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How do people respond to evidence of their own privilege? Some will deny it. They'll try to tell you that earning $90,000+ per year makes them a middle income earner. Others will ignore it. And others still will try to justify it -- they'll say they deserve to be better off th...

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I have a dim recollection that somewhere someone has done a set of graphs of the rapidly contracting time horizons of scientists’ and economists’ predictions of environmental and economic problems arising from climate change, biodiversity reduction, risk to food supply and ene...

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Tony Harris's AFR column from a few weeks ago. (posted by Nicholas G on Tony's account.) The Australian National Audit Office last week reported on the government’s abandoned ceiling insulation stimulus program. It found that the environment department should have given earlie...

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One word would be OK too - Tragedy. HT Lord Turner (again).

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The floods in Pakistan have resulted in about 1,600 deaths, with many more expected (even disregarding the possibility of a cholera outbreak), and have stranded or displaced about 12 million people. The worst aspect seems to be that this is just a taste of what's to come, if t...

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The centrist and left-leaning commentariat have unanimously condemned Julia Gillard's (non) stance on climate change policy, an exercise in groupthink that would be stunning if it wasn't so predictable. Ben Cubby , Peter Hartcher , Lenore Taylor and Shaun Carne y all think Gil...

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No time to say much right now, but I was intrigued to see the People's Chamber. Why wouldn't I be? And disappointed it was scorned so instantly by various operatives around the traps. Of course the atmospherics for its introduction might have been better - this is a rescue ope...

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Via LP we have a piece by Laura Tingle in the AFR on Tuesday which describes efforts to create a "consumption based" rather than "production based" ETS. I held off commenting until I read the piece itself, but my confusion is still here. Take this paragraph. Charging people fo...

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It's been raining on and off just about every day in Darwin for more than two weeks. Who cares you might ask? Well, it's the dry season. You get the occasional shower in the dry season but not rain for weeks on end. It's certainly never happened before in the 27 years I've liv...

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My last post on the UK and the third way began with this sentence. What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vis...

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So Obama got his modest and compromised health care bill through Congress. For those who are more interested in policy than process, there's a pretty helpful summary of the legislation here . However, I hold the desirabilty of the reforms to be self-evident. The only serious i...

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Well it's not that beautiful, but then lots of bird's tails are not that beautiful. But make a few simple evolutionary rules and somewhere amazing things happen. Like this website on accommodation in Chester that thinks that if it republishes Paul Frijter's post on engineering...

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Two apparently unrelated articles by superstars of the 1980s and 90s in their respective fields which share a common theme - the market's aversion to serious innovation, it's tendency to move incrementally towards lower levels of innovation leaving really fundamental and specu...

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The lads from the BBC radio comedy The Now Show, distill the essence of Copenhagen. The English Blog has the transcript

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Jumping the shark Untill Tuesday night Ian Plimer was the respectable face of climate scepticism in Australia. Plimer looks the part of the distinguished professor, and as a geologist gives the impression of understanding the long run forces affecting the earth's climate, as o...

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''Hang on, woah woah woah woah!" If you believe Paul Sheehan we can thank Alan Jones for the demise of Malcolm Turnbull and the derailment of the CPRS. Every time a Liberal backbencher is asked why he or she withdrew their support for Ian MacFarlane's deal, the answer is the s...

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Last week the Prime Minister made a plea to the House, for the members to vote in the national interest, not their party interest. Where are the members of the ALP who are voting in the national interest?

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From Universe Today Ice loss in Barrow Alaska from 2006 to 2007. Credit: US Geological Survey Last week the US government released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice that have been used to help scientists study the impact of climate change. The images were...

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I was struck by Krugman's column on greenhouse . I've been working myself up into a lather of pessimism on greenhouse. Not only is this a really really hard problem to solve, but the way we're going about solving it is just so awful from so many perspectives, it's hard to innu...

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Over at Penguin Unearthed . Extreme distributions 20 February, 2009 by penguinunearthed John Connor , CEO of the Climate Institute , made a speech today talking about bushfires. Ive been pondering one of his key points for the last two weeks, ever since the bushfires . Climate...

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Since I lived in a group house with him, I've stayed in touch with David Evans and discussed various issues - mostly economic - via email with him. As a result I get the odd group email from him setting out his views on greenhouse in which he argues that an ETS is a stupid ide...

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Would you find lots of oval shaped stations popping up all over the place in your city an eyesore? And they have advertising on them. Still, I reckon you wouldn't. You see they're bike exchange stations and in Paris they've got them every 300 metres or so. And I just know that...

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Fresh from Krugman's blog . As usual, it can't be put much better. Economics of catastrophe Away from the headlines, theres a really important discussion going on about how to think about the economics of climate change. The key player is Marty Weitzman, who has made a simple...

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Andrew Bolt admonishes abusive foam flecked greens for their reaction to a grim metaphor and contrasts the obsession with AGW with a lack of concern about the coarsening of our culture. A moderator has just told me half a dozen spectacularly nasty comments have had to be snipp...

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Hat tip Joshua Gans.

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For some reason, Saint decided to include an anti-global warming rant in today's Missing Link . It's part of an "interview" between warming denialist Institute of Public Affairs shill/ scientist Jennifer Marohasy and denialist pundit Michael Duffy: Duffy asked Marohasy: Is the...

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There was an extraordinary article in the Australian yesterday ( here ) by Vaclav Klaus. In his article, which is a condensation of a speech for a conference of climate sceptics, Vaclav makes mince meat out of the climate alarmists and accuses them of having bad intentions. He...

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Whats the difference between James Lovelock environmental scientist and inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, and Andrew Bolt Herald Sun columnist and inventor of such useful terms such as red mist, green gods and compassion industry? Well... less than you might think. James Lovelo...

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Thanks to Ross for permission to post what he calls his 'sermon to the Rudd Government' delivered as: NEW DIRECTIONS IN ECONOMY POLICY, a talk to the Economic Society evening seminar, Sydney, Tuesday February 26, 2008 It occurs to me that, as the journalist of the panel, the m...

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A week or so ago I was rung by the NSW Unions and asked to speak to the Unsworth Committee which is looking at the NSW's proposal to privatise retail and generating assets in the NSW industry. They wanted me to speak on the AAA rating. I said I wouldn't oppose the privatisatio...

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Well, that pun has been made before I just made it, but I was going over Crikeys I'd not had time to glance at this week and came across Christine Milne's take on Garnaut. As I read it at first I thought it was Glenn Milne and it rather took me aback. In any event, Milne's pie...

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I've just been asked by the Department of PM&C to nominate someone to go to the 202o Summit. Who should I nominate - and why? This post will be moderated strictly. Suggestions should be serious and I hope you'll provide good reasons. Of course there will be people who want to...

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The Age asked me for 200 words on whether the Government should renege on the tax cuts. I said they shouldn't. They also asked Joshua Gans what he thought - though they don't seem to have asked him for a direct opinion on the tax cuts. I wasn't going to bother posting my piece...

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This piece was written for the AFR as a longish op ed. It hung around on account of it being hard to squeeze in as offshore financial systems melted down and as interest rates in Australia melted up. But I'm glad it's out. A month or so having passed between its having been wr...

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Being a bit of a columnist, I like a good column. I think the best column I've done was on greenhouse. I've just read the best column I've read this year, and it's on greenhouse. By a master of the column - Martin Wolf. Go read it - I've reproduced it below the fold for you. I...

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Below the fold is my column on Bali and greenhouse from today's Australian . AS representatives of the world's peoples wrestled in Bali with the greatest challenge to human co-operation we have ever known, different ideas of what was fair and what wasn't threatened to tear the...

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I've been writhing around writing a column on greenhouse. I find columns on greenhouse hard as I complained here . But rewarding when you get what you wanted to say said in the exacting form of an op ed. I've just finished writing an op ed for the Oz on Bali and was contemplat...

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Here's an informative set of graphs from a column by Martin Wolf on climate change. Australia's failure against it's emissions is unexplained in the diagram - since we're much closer to our Kyoto target then the graph has us - but I presume the reason is that the emissions cou...

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Cross-posted from Peter Gallagher's site , with Peter's permission in light of Nicholas Gruen's post here at Troppo on the same topic. Sir Nicholas Stern argues , ahead of the Bali meeting of the UNFCCC, for binding, differentiated emission targets and international trading. I...

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I was disappointed by this op ed from fellow second generation Dunera Boy Sir Nicholas Stern. As we know, Sir Nicholas threw the switch to Vaudeville in his report on the economics of climate change. I don't have too much problem with that given the seriousness of the issue an...

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Nicholas Gruen must be psychic. He's been spruiking in these pages for creative ideas for state government co-operative policy action. And lo and behold! The States themselves, led by longtime Kyoto advocate NSW Premier Bob Carr, come out with a proposal to introduce a State-b...

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