Category Archives: Environment

Green taxes: we’re not doing so well

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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 ‘goods’ to the taxation of ‘bads’.

It’s hard to detect any ideological patterns here. The Nordics do a bit better than the Anglosphere, if you correct for their larger than usual tax take (which would mean their green tax revenue would be a substantially higher proportion of GDP than suggested in the graph to the left).

There’s also a few of the more newly industrialising economies on the right hand (good) side of the graph – like Turkey and Korea and the Eastern European countries.  Perhaps they’ve got more advice from economists. Who knows?

But I wish we scored better than we do.

 

Measures of wellbeing, health and longevity

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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, but catch up it has and now everyone and their dog is getting a wellbeing index.

The French had a few Nobel Laureates drop in, the Canadians are off and running and the UK Conservatives (a tribute to Tony Blair as the Rudd/Gillard Govt has been a tribute to John Howard) want their index of wellbeing. And the OECD has just launched a very natty website where you can run the numbers on all the OECD countries over eleven thematic areas.

When you get into trying to set these indices up various things jump out at you.  The first is the mountain of literature on it all. Another is the many different methodologies you can employ – should you measure things ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’? Then there’s how they relate to each other – are the measures commensurate? And if you’ve got several measures of some aspect, how should they be aggregated and do they make sense together? It’s amazing how much the various indicators are just added up and given equal weight. Still it’s hard to think of any obviously superior approaches.

Anyway, the prompt for this post was reading the approach on the new OECD website to measuring health. The OECD have used the women’s clothing store Susan’s slogan “this goes with that”. They’ve slapped together two simple measures – and why not one objective one and one subjective one? The first is life-expectancy at birth and the second is self-reported health status. Sounds fair enough. The problem is that a predominant influence on self reported health status is age.  So those countries with older populations report lower health. There are other things going on of course, but ageing is obviously a large part of the self-reported health index. Japan which has the highest life expectancy at birth – a whopping 82 – and which has major ageing issues has the second lowest reported health status. By contrast, Australia has high life expectancy but relatively low ageing, at least compared with some of our OECD peers. The ageing Mediterranean countries are likewise high on the life expectancy index and low on the self-reported health index. I would have liked to see the self reported health index corrected for age.

 

Environmental performance

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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 when it’s quantitatively measured (something that isn’t true), it seems to be about as thorough as these things can reasonably be.

Here’s their map of the world. If you’re keen on the environment head to Scandinavia (with France being an honorary Scandinavian for these purposes)  and better still North West Scandinavia (Iceland), which also seems to be making a better fist of recovering from it’s GFC meltdown than other countries (hint: if things get too bad, default). Antarctica and Greenland are also in pretty good shape, though I hear they can get quite cold.

 

Seeking alternatives to nuclear and fossil fuels

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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 western nations with free media. Whatever may be the wholly utilitarian risk/benefit analysis, the images and sense of Armageddon we’re seeing coming out of Japan will be imprinted on people’s minds permanently, meaning that politicians from now on simply won’t be able to propose nuclear power solutions without facing terminal electoral consequences.

The images coming out of Japan mean that it’s game, set and match to the Greens on the nuke power issue and we need to get on and develop other sustainable, low carbon baseload power options.

However, it appears that currently feasible non-nuclear and non-fossil fuel baseload power options (i.e. commercially deployable in the near future) are by no means obvious.

Nuclear pebble bed reactors seemed to hold some hope of cheaper nuclear options that didn’t carry the risk of overheating and meltdown so evident in Japan. However, trial reactor programs have largely been abandoned as unpromising.

Hydrogen fuel is fraught with problems that haven’t been solved, mostly related to its volatility, lightness and very low energy/volume ratio.  Compressing or liquefying it are both extraordinarily expensive.

Solar thermal might be capable of development to something approaching baseload constant availability with storage of energy generated during the day (e.g. superheated water) but certainly isn’t ready to be deployed on a large scale.  Moreover cost appears almost prohibitive:

Due to the nature of technology and the electricity market, says BZE, the carbon price would need to be above $70 a tonne before it could begin to have benefits for any new form of renewable energy generation. Between $70 and $200 a tonne, the signal is for extra growth in wind power combined with (what Wright calls) ”fossil gas”. More than $200 a tonne is needed to make baseload solar thermal viable at current prices.

“Clean coal” is almost certainly an expensive fantasy at least in most parts of the world, because very large underground storage caverns for the Co2 extracted to make “clean” coal just don’t exist.

So what else is there?  I’d be most interested in readers’  thoughts.

I note that the Green lobby is arguing that you really don’t need any baseload power sources at all, and that enough continuous electricity can be delivered by a patchwork of renewable but non-continuous sources, perhaps supplemented occasionally by reserve LNG plants.  Mark Diesendorff is a leading local proponent of that approach, and a retired scientist Dr David Mills claims that the US could meet all its current electricity needs with such a patchwork approach and without relying on either nuclear or fossil fuels.  Somehow I have my doubts, but again I’d be interested in readers’ thoughts (especially those with some relevant knowledge/expertise).

Unpacking the Yasi hype

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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 weather event but well worth reading in my opinion.

Cyclone Yasi was a big and scarey storm system.  Media and politicians continue to refer to it as a Category 5 cyclone with winds nearing 300 kmh near its centre, the largest cyclone ever to hit a populated area in Australia.  But is that really true?  A fairly obscure story on Australian Geographic website points out that “the full force may never be known because there are no gauges where the monster storm made landfall” and an engineer interviewed on last Friday’s 7:30 Report suggested that available data indicated Yasi was probably a small to medium Category 4 system with winds a bit over 200 kmh.  But that’s just about the full extent of any questioning of Yasi’s actual strength and destructive force.  What does the evidence actually tell us?

Don’t get me wrong; it did seem like it was going to be a very large event and government authorities were well justified in taking the steps they did to encourage residents to take it very seriously.  Looking at the Bureau of Meteorology site and at the radar images you could see this was a very nasty storm that was going to hit the coast.  Moreover, even if it WAS “only” a small-medium Category 4 cyclone that’s still a very large storm with frightening and lethal destructive force.

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Waiting for Yasi

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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 in Darwin myself (but thankfully not Tracy), my thoughts are very much with people in north Queensland today as Cyclone Yasi approaches.

That’s especially the case because the 2 academics sitting in the offices immediate adjacent to me here at CDU, Shaune and Tanjil, have recently relocated here from Cairns and haven’t sold their house there yet.  Fortunately it isn’t in a cyclone surge zone but it’s an old Queenslander that probably isn’t built to current cyclone code, so it might well suffer major damage if the winds hit Cairns at anywhere near Category 5 intensity (280-300kmh).  It currently looks very likely that very destructive winds WILL hit Cairns even though the most likely path at present takes the centre over Innisfail just to the south, because Yasi is so large that very destructive winds will extend a long way north and south of the centre.

Even newer houses built to current Building Code may well be at risk from a Category 5.  Apparently new houses in north Queensland have been required since 1982 to be constructed to withstand Category 4 winds (200 kmh or thereabouts), but that may not help if the winds are 30% stronger than that.  There’s a recurring controversy here in Darwin as to whether our Building code should require engineering new buildings to Category 5 standard, because here too the Code only requires Category 4 despite the devastation of Tracy (whose strength no-one knows for sure because it destroyed all the measuring intrumentation!).

Personally I don’t have a problem with only requiring building to Category 4 on ordinary precautionary principles.  The probability of being hit by a Category 5 appears to be relatively low, it’s much more expensive to engineer to Category 5, and in a worst case scenario losing your house isn’t the end of the world as long as you’re adequately insured and take your precious photos and the like with you when you evacuate.  Problems only occur if you unwisely decide to stay put in a house whose survival in a large cyclone is questionable, or if you leave your departure until too late.  That happened to us in one of the Darwin cyclones we went through.  A tree blew down across our driveway just as we were about to evacuate to a city hotel for the duration, so we had to stay put.  It was fairly nerve-racking given that the house where I then lived was only a couple of metres above sea level and right on the waterfront.  Fortunately that cyclone veered off and missed Darwin.

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Can wind farms make light aircraft pilots fall out of the sky?

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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 how wind turbines kill birds and why wind farms can’t be built close to airfields:

There is a common misconception that birds are sliced up by wind turbine blades, which appear to be spinning slowly but are actually travelling at speeds of up to 200km at the tip. In fact, birds die when they encounter the windshear and pressure changes caused by banks of wind turbines churning up the air. They literally pop and fall out of the sky. This is why there is a ban on wind farms being built near airfields, lest light aircraft pilots meet the same fate.

Lloyd seems a little confused. While there is some evidence that bats can be killed by a sudden drop in pressure caused by flying too close to the tips of a turbine’s blades, this isn’t how most birds are killed. Birds typically die after colliding with blades.

A study by Erin Baerwald, Genevieve D’Amours, Brandon Klug and Robert Barclay (pdf), reported that "Even if echolocation allows bats to detect and avoid turbine blades, they may be incapacitated or killed by internal injuries caused by rapid pressure reductions they can not detect." These pressure changes cause air in the bats’ lungs to expand leading the small blood vessels around the edges of the lungs to burst — a process known as barotrauma. But according to the researchers:

Birds are also killed at wind turbines, but at most wind energy facilities fewer birds than bats are killed, and barotrauma has not been suggested as a cause of bird fatalities.

As for the idea that pressure changes will cause light aircraft pilots to fall out of the sky like bats, this seems unlikely. According to Baerwald, the zone around the blade tips in which pressure suddenly drops is only a metre or so in diameter. The major reason wind farms aren’t allowed near airfields is because pilots might fly into them — especially at night.

Peak Coal

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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 energy resource inaccessibility and the like.

If these graphs don’t exist, they should. (I’m talking about graphing contracting time horizons of reputable predictions here).

One potentially graphable set of predictions concern the economically useful future of coal.

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