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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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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Let's first agree that if Trump is a blessing in disguise for world peace, he makes an exceptionally good disguise. Trump's bark is probably the worst of any US president in living memory. He has threatened the total destruction of North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and probably 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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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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As Orwell put it “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” At least in economics one of the things that sets up intellectuals for this is the way so much of their discipline seeks to get 'below' the level of immediate intuition to something...

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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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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB6V7XU5H6A] It seems like time to review progress on the Gunner government’s quest to create a vibrant Darwin CBD. They actually appointed an assistant Minister for that noble quest (Paul Kirby) on achieving government in 2016. In term...

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The OECD has joined The Movement. In a new report it's saying that plastic recycling isn't working. So we've got to make it work . Fair enough. Perhaps we should. But you'd think that reading their material on it, there might be some discussion as to whether this was the most...

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After exhaustive discussion, I've been deputed to inform our readers of Troppo's plastic bag policy. We're in favour of single-use plastic bags. In fact, we're making them compulsory. I was recently in Book Grocer and was refused a plastic bag, though they were prepared to giv...

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[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="504"] Can this moustache save the world?[/caption] A friend asked me on linked in for my comment on this grand lecture by Jeremy Rivkin. I reproduce my initial reaction and then a longer set of comments I offered after having listened...

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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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Research Design Meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation Date: 2016-12 By: Abdulkadiroğlu, Atila (Duke University) ; Angrist, Joshua (MIT) ; Narita, Yusuke (Yale University) ; Pathak, Parag A. (MIT) Atmospheric pollution was an important side eff...

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The following is a guest post by David Morris, Principal Lawyer of the Environmental Defenders Office (NT). The Northern Territory already carries a 1 billion dollar burden for legacy mines. These are mine sites where the company has walked away and left ongoing environmental...

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Governments around the world have in recent years destroyed their seized stockpiles of illegal ivor y, egged on by the World Wildlife Federation which believes it sends a signal to gangs that kill Elephants and Rhinos for their tusks. In January, Sri Lanka reportedly crushed 3...

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This week's announcement by Pangaea Resources that it is suspending its NT onshore gas exploration drilling program and laying off 140 workers, following the Labor Opposition's indication that it will impose an indefinite moratorium on fracking, has provoked predictable respon...

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[caption id="attachment_28231" align="aligncenter" width="676"] From National Geographic[/caption] Julie Bishop is in strife with the left-leaning Twittersphere for making light of the plight of Pacific Islanders, who are seemingly in peril of sinking beneath the waves due to...

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I've written a few Northern Territory posts recently. This is another one, but it has some significant national implications (I think). Tuesday's announcement of Asian conglomerate Jemena as the preferred bidder to construct a gas pipeline connecting the Northern Territory to...

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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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Gray Matters: Fetal Pollution Exposure and Human Capital Formation by Prashant Bharadwaj, Joshua Graff Zivin, Matthew Gibson, Christopher A. Neilson Abstract: This paper examines the impact of fetal exposure to air pollution on 4th grade test scores in Santiago, Chile. We rely...

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http://youtu.be/0B5xPYUNGeA Scribe publishing occasionally sends me a catalogue of books it's publishing asking if I'd like to have one to review. Looking through their long list I picked my friend Tim Colebatch's biography of Rupert Hamer on which he's been working for a good...

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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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Last Thursday I posed the question of how often the water you drink has been pissed by a vertebrate already. If the number is very small, then those who baulk at drinking recycled water have more cause to complain than if the number is very high. As some commentators to that p...

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The picture below is of a mountainous area in Spain. It used to be full of small-scale farmers and is now almost deserted. Over the many centuries that farmers have tried to eek something useful out of this area, they created terraces all the way to the top of the mountains. I...

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Here's an extract from a book on fair trade that I had occasion to look up. In what circumstances is fair trade a good thing? If we dig into our pockets to buy something at a higher price than necessary in order to engage in 'fair trade', then we know a few things. The sacrifi...

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Herewith Bob McDonald's second post on fisheries economics. With Australia being the last 'settled' continent, the flattest and driest and without reliable streamflow from snow melt it is not outrageous to suggest its fisheries are unique. Until WW2 Australian commercial fish...

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On a Background Briefing program on micro-targeting of political campaigning and advertising, I was being pressed by the interviewer. If people hate negative ads, if they degrade the reputation of politicians, why do they do it? I likened it to over-fishing where each fisher p...

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Herewith my op ed from the Herald and Age today. What is the good life and are we living it? Assessing and measuring wellbeing has vexed us since ancient times. But a funny thing happened on the modern world’s way to the answer. The metric that economists used to dampen down t...

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A friend of mine, and a great contributor to Australian public policy, Mike Waller, a man who sketched out Australian competition policy on a single page and fed it up the line as an FAS in PM&C in the late 80s (or perhaps it was 1990), has wrenched himself from the policy sce...

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I tend to get increasingly grumpy as I get to the fag end of final exam marking. This morning provided a classic example. I received in my email inbox a typically sanctimonious, patronising communication from someone in another School who is in the habit of sending frequent un...

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By calling it the greatest moral challenge of our generation , Kevin Rudd framed climate change as a moral issue. Now as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is putting a price on carbon. So why isn't she getting credit from people who care passionately about the issue? The reason is...

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Odd that a country like Oz in which economic reform has been such a buzzword, in which economists have, over the last generation had so much influence, have had so little impact on doing something so obviously sensible, which is to move as far as possible from the taxation of...

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I've written a few times on measures of wellbeing on Troppo. For instance here and here . (In fact, reviewing it, I can't find both of my articles for New Matilda on the Australia Institute's GPI, so here they both are (pdf).) As ever Troppo was hip before the world caught up,...

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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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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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* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional. Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin "storm chaser" enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy. It's a keen amateur perspective on a frightening w...

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Links to follow developments : BOM map and updates ; Yasi Twitter feed compiled by ABC The frightening power of even a modest cyclone has to be experienced to really understand just how big a threat such a weather event poses. Having been through a couple of small-ish cyclones...

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In a recent post, Troppo's Ken Parish suggested that quality newspapers serve a gatekeeping role, ensuring "at least some measure of quality assurance". So what's happening at the Australian? In a recent piece on wind farms, environment editor Graham Lloyd attempted to explain...

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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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Australia's pro- and anti-population growth advocates seem to be competing with each other to see who can produce the most glib, fact-free piece of propaganda. Dick Smith's entertaining anti-growth advocacy-doco Dick Smith's Population Puzzle , screened in the lead-up to the r...

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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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Yep, its getting yucky down there in the Gulf. From Nasa's Earth Observatory . On June 12, 2010, oil from the still-leaking Deepwater Horizon well was particularly visible across the northern Gulf of Mexico when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA...

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News stories about the current population debate tend to be prefaced with the factoid that 'on current trends Australia's population will reach 35 million in 2050'. We are supposed to find this startling, either because we've only just adjusted to the idea of our millions bein...

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The global warming debate has morphed into Mondo Bizzaro. Rudd is capable of mounting a succinct and persuasive explanation of his emissions trading scheme but chooses not to do so, preferring to shift the electoral focus to subjects the pollsters tell him are more unequivocal...

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Mike Steketee was one of several commentators echoing Turnbull's point that the ETS is basically the policy that the Howard Government took to the 2007 election. He infers from this that the poor old Liberal Party has been captured by a rump of reactionaries who have taken adv...

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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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Interesting development! Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less or, should I say,...

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The chances of the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference actually reaching a workable global agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions sufficiently to make a major impact on warming are remote. In an article at Online Opinion , three academics from the Centre for Global Stud...

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It's becoming increasingly clear that the only likely outcome of the current manoeuvrings over the Rudd government's Emissions Trading Scheme is that it will either be rejected by the Senate or so drastically watered down as to be almost entirely useless. If (like me) you acce...

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At John P. Boerschig Ranches , they 'do have an organized Black Buck hunting package. This hunt is available at our Brackettville Ranch, which has excellent accommodations with all the comforts of home.' Is it ethical to hunt feral pigs for fun? James Valentine thinks so. He d...

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So the economy has problems. Spare a thought for the citizens of New York where the bedbug plague is reaching crisis proportions with a 34% increase in official complaints last year. There are lots and lots of people who are having a devastating experience with bedbugs," said...

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Tim Blair reports on Yvonne Ridley the British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped by the Taliban who has won a case for unfair dismissal against the Islam News Channel. Earlier in the year she won nearly £14,000 in damages after winning a four-year unfair...

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The recent post on architectural delights reminded me that during the Beaconsfield mining disaster I googled Beaconsfield and turned up some pictures of the Batman Bridge nearby. That led to some more pictures of Tasmanian bridges and one of them led to some other bridges in V...

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And exciting presentation of fascinating data. Hat tip to a Troppodillian whose email I have now lost but who emailed me a week or so ago suggesting I watch this and write it up on Troppo. Apologies, this isn't much of a write up, but I'm afraid I'm flat out. And I didn't thin...

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Toyota Prius - not as green as it seems, but the forthcoming "plug-in" one might be If there's a certain bet flowing from last weekend's Gippsland by-election result, it's the proposition that any inclusion of petrol in Labor's emissions trading scheme will be carefully struct...

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Here's a column I've just written published today in the AFR. The Gruen Transfer Those with an unusual surname have to get used to spelling it. No its not Gluner. Not Glueball or Grewbie its Gruen G-R-U-E-N. The compensation is, your name identifies you or a family member pret...

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Today's Herald reports that the NSW Treasury has done its own estimates of the costs of achieving various targets for carbon emissions. The NSW Treasurer, Michael Costa, said it would cost $430 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 per cent as outlined by Ross...

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[caption id="attachment_30542" align="alignleft" width="654"] Firbank College from the air (You could probably tell that it was "from the air" - but this is Club Troppo boldly going where no stakeholders' expectations have every been.)[/caption] I spent the day - well the firs...

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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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[caption id="attachment_30539" align="alignleft" width="317"] These types of tram-poles still exist at three Three Sites: Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda Peel Street, North Melbourne Victoria Parade, East Melbourne. [1. As explained on the Victorian Heritage Website "These three set...

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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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One of the clichés of industry policy from the late 1970s on is that inward orientation is to be avoided - outward or export oriented policy is the go. There are lots of good reasons for this. We didn't see those reasons and then failed to notice the empirical evidence that wa...

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From Crikey! linking to the NYT. Unnoticed and unappreciated for five decades, a large female turtle with a stained, leathery shell is now a precious commodity in this citys decaying zoo. She is fed a special diet of raw meat. Her small pool has been encased with bulletproof g...

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In a story in Today's Crikey! , Guy Rundle raises a subject dear to my heart about which I am, alas, ignorant. Why are so many of our planning regulations negative - the most obvious being height restrictions, when what we really want from regulation is collective action to ma...

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Over at Lava Rodeo, tigtog posts about an advocacy site put together by American-inspired and left-leaning lobby group GetUp! and an assortment of greenie groups "advocating placing your vote according to candidates records on climate change." Tigtog laments the lack of any an...

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Here are a couple of monuments , the first recently errected in Dublin, the second on the drawing boards. They're by the same architect. Where Melbourne got the angular yellow beams of Denton Corker Marshall, Dublin and soon Wales will have the gleaming spires of Ian Richie Ar...

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Well there you go! I read that blog action day - whatever that is - is due for the 15th Oct. Not only is it blog action day, but it's all been arranged that we rap about the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own t...

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If human behaviour is about maximising utility from a stable set of preferences, why assume that a rational actor will accumulate true beliefs? What if the most efficient way of satisfying an individual's preferences involves false beliefs? If theorists like Gary Becker are ri...

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Deinococcus radiodurans is an amazing bacteria . It can happily live in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors. Bacteria is a brutally simple and resilient form of life. It can survive vacuum, cold, heat, radiation, pressure: you name it, a bacteria has evolved to solve that envi...

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Ubiquitous blogosphere commenter Joe Cambria has posted a really interesting contribution on Rex Ringschott's coal thread , suggesting a variey of greenhouse gas reduction policies as an alternative to either carbon taxes or tradeable emissions permits. Joe's ideas deserve a t...

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Big business lobbyists and greedy foreigners are turning Sydney into an overcrowded hell hole, says Clive Hamilton . In Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald Hamilton draws on John Calhoun's famous rat experiments to argue that Sydney risks becoming a ' behavioural sink ' -- a city...

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Last week I spent some time collecting some data from various sources that summarise the differences and relationships between various crude measures of national performance, mostly for an introductory class on regression (which according to Rafe is the most fun that you can h...

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Harry Clarke draws our attention to the demise of Earth Sanctuaries Limited (ESL). It has been in bad trouble for a long time. It's a very sad day. ESL was a marvellous experiment in private conservation hounded out of existence by jealous bureaucrats and the ideologues of the...

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Helen Caldicott is one of the more notable distorters of truth among Australian "public intellectuals". Like the Australia Institute's Clive Hamilton, though on a global stage, she appears to rank making an ideological point well ahead of accuracy or acknowledgment of inconven...

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Spam email is the bane of my life. At one time a few years ago I was naive enough to leave my real CDU email address when commenting on blogs. Of course, it was harvested by the spammers and the number of spam emails I get in my work inbox has been spiralling upwards ever sinc...

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I was walking in the Dandenongs with my kids the other day and told them of the extraordinary capacity of the lyrebird for imitating the sounds it hears in the bush (not much in the way of human speech unlike parrots). I don't know if they believed me about its virtuosity, but...

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With our usual flair for lobbing grenades back and forth between well dug trenches, lots of energy in the greenhouse debate goes into grenade lobbing between supporters of Kyoto and greenhouse denialism of various kinds. I'm pretty cynical about Kyoto, and particularly cynical...

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[photopress:volcanoaurora2_shs.jpg,full,centered] A volcano and Aurora Borealis

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Greens risk being seen as 'watermelons' -- green on the outside but red on the inside -- says David McKnight . By attaching themselves to the struggle for trade union rights and radical egalitarianism they are playing into the hands of critics who see them as just another bran...

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The Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate comprises the US, Australia, China, India, Japan and South Korea. As they met in Sydney last week, I kept thinking of the planet Venus. Over 95 per cent of Venus' atmosphere is carbon-dioxide or CO2. That's the prin...

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You may nor may not think this is a good colum, but it took me bloody ages to write. It helps to have a single line to stick to in a column given the need for simplicity, clarity and brevity. But it seemed to me that there were important parallels between what William Easterly...

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This post is inspired by a suggestion from reader Steve on my previous post about serious playfulness as a way of promoting constructive blog debate. Imagine that it's 2006. The new Australian Prime Minister Dr Brendan Nelson has been convinced by reading this post at Troppo A...

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Tim Lambert and John Quiggin have both been banging on about global warming rather a lot lately. Tim's Global Warming Sceptic Bingo post is an especially useful corrective source for the spurious and fraudulent material typically trotted out by global warming sceptics. But Tim...

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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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Tasmanian tiger spotted begging for food outside the Subway outlet in City Walk Canberra (it seems to like meatballs).

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Biodiesel is one of the most promising sources of renewable energy . Made from crops like soy beans, American supporters claim it can enhance national security , protect the environment, and reduce the trade deficit. Farmers , environmentalists , and opponents of the war in Ir...

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Biodiesel is safer for the environment because it produces lower emissions and is made from renewable sources, say supporters . But the snag for morally motivated vegetarians is that those renewable sources can include cows, pigs, and chickens. Biodiesel is an alternative to p...

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Long-time Troppo readers may recall that I was once a moderate global warming sceptic, a viewpoint more commonly found in people with far more rabidly right wing views than my own. It tended to confuse readers more than a jot. But my scepticism arose not from Don Arthur's belo...

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What with most southern capitals facing severe water shortages and scorching summer temperatures already beginning to occur (I gather it was 37 in Adelaide yesterday), it's an opportune time for passionate advocates of the Kyoto Climate Protocol to start ratcheting up the rhet...

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Back from a few days in Kakadu. I see that my sincere flattery of Geoff and Wendy failed to flush either of them out of the blogging woodwork. Maybe it might do the trick if more of you mob were to say really really nice things about them in the comment box. I had intended to...

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I don't have a problem per se with John Howard's announcement yesterday of a $500 million program to subsidise the development of currently non-commercial "low carbon emission" technologies. It's fairly clearly aimed mostly at development of so-called "carbon sequestration" te...

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The life of a global warming sceptic is a dangerous one, it seems. Well-known sceptic John Daly died suddenly of a heart attack earlier this year, and now one of his frequently-published colleagues (on the Daly website at least) Theodor Landscheidt has also shuffled off a few...

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A few days ago Paddy McGuinness published a rant in the SMH that stuck in my memory. It touched on urban development strategies, and in particular the vogue topic of "urban consolidation": - Roads and other infrastructure, even waste disposal, can no longer be left to conflict...

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* Warning another long global warming post - probably should be ignored by all but enthusiasts. John Quiggin and Ken Miles are both erudite and generally mild-mannered bloggers, except when it comes to the global warming debate. John Quiggin, for instance, tends to label peopl...

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UnAustralian Ken Miles has a reflexive whinge about an article in yesterday's Australian newspaper by noted geologist Professor Ian Plimer. Why? Well, I can't be sure because I didn't buy yesterday's Oz, and the article isn't online (at least not for free). But it's a fair bet...

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One of the difficult things for us non-expert lay observers of the ongoing global warming debate is that the zealots on both sides seem to have little hesitation in misusing climate statistics to "prove" their case. The website of global warming sceptic John Daly currently con...

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At the risk of boring readers rigid, I can't resist another blast on climate change/global warming. It's partly provoked by Wayne Wood's Homer Simpson perspective on global warming (immediately below) and partly by a Salon article linked by John Quiggin , which highlights the...

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Troppo Armadillo doesn't have the huge audience of a megablog like Instapundit, but it certainly attracts the attention of more than a few key participants in important debates. The latest is Nir Shaviv, one of the two researchers whose paper on the influence of supernovae on...

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At the risk of fuelling up John Quiggin and UnAustralian Ken Miles (though only with renewable energy resources), here's a fascinating post on Aaron Oakley's Bizarre Science summarising new research suggesting that much of the observed 20th century global warming is actually c...

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(Via Aaron Oakley ) Rachel Carson's Silent Spring anti-DDT tract was a fraudulent beat-up , and millions of third world residents have died from malaria and other easily preventable insect-borne diseases as a result of its ill-advised banning in the early 1970s. The author eve...

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( *Warning - long blog ahead) Longer term readers of Troppo Armadillo will know that one of my pet hobbyhorses has been the global warming debate. However, I've been a bit remiss of late. Ken Miles (the UnAustralian) has been blogging away for weeks, undertaking an admirably d...

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