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Greg Jericho
The arrival of the Queen to Australia usually is accompanied by masses of articles and opinion pieces on the idea of Australia becoming a republic and the 1999 Republic referendum.
This week there has been bugger-all care about such matters - after all why would you want to discuss such things when the important issue is whether or not our Prime Minister genuflected herself in some feudal-age ritual before a woman placed in her position of supposed superiority purely because her uncle decided he wanted to marry a divorced American rather than stay King, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India of the United Kingdom.
Curtsies? Give me strength.
But the defeat in the 1999 republic referendum is a perfect example of how the progressive side of politics can fail spectacularly when it puts its mind to it, and I believe has much in common with the carbon price debate.
Last week, when discussing the Occupy movement with a friend on Twitter, he noted "… the left has a way of killing its young". He is right, and a good example perhaps is my piece last week. The left also has a way of distrusting its older types, which invariably ends up with the left (or progressive side if you will) spending more time destroying each other than its actual opponents.
We saw this in spades back in 1999.
Back then the Australian Republican Movement supported a minimalist model, whereas the young Turks (in spirit if not age) like Phil Cleary favoured an elected president. Those in favour of a republic failed to achieve any real consensus and thus the question put forward by John Howard for the referendum was one that would thus fail to get the full support of the republican side, meaning a 50 per cent plus result was impossible.
All the anti-republic crowd had to do was highlight the goodness of the status quo and the lack of consensus of the other side. They won over those who did not believe in the republic and those who weren't sure about the republic model put forward.
The carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) proffered by Kevin Rudd went through the same awful process – for reasons to do with the progressive side's ability to self destruct and because of the rise of Tony Abbot – a man who fought long and hard on the anti-republican side throughout the 1990s.
For example we had Rudd refusing to undertake any real discussion with the Greens. Thus we were left with a situation where we had the Greens not wanting to agree with Rudd and Turnbull. Tony Abbott saw what was going on, and as soon as he took over leadership, he played the republic referendum gambit to its full. He knew the Greens weren't going to vote with the ALP, he also knew he had status quo on his side.
You see the republicans (and I am one of them) love to talk about the idiocy of the monarchical system – where someone is given the right to rule purely on the basis of his or her birth. Back in 1999 Geoffrey Robertson loved to talk about how the monarchy was sexist because the first son gets priority over the first daughter.
Oh yes we were right (we are still right). The monarchy makes no sense. Were you creating a system of government now you would never select one family to have rights over all others. The Australian Republican Movement also had many celebrities who loved a republic. It would be wonderful, it would be perfect, and it would give us standing in the eyes of the world. And oh did we laugh at those who were worried about becoming a republic because we would be ineligible for the Commonwealth Games or because of the cost about renaming the RAAF to the AAF.
The anti-republicans didn't argue about systems of government – they merely pointed to our 100 years of stable democracy and also the occasional mention of how lovely the Queen was and you wouldn't want to upset such a person would you? They had very little desire to actually debate the monarchy – even going so far as to suggest the governor-general is essentially our head of state, and thus wondering what all the fuss was about.
Abbott, when he approached the CPRS, followed the script perfectly. Debate alternate climate change policy? Bugger that. Why when you can point to the status quo, our strong economy and that companies like LinFox are already doing good things so what is all the fuss about?
The switch from the CPRS to the carbon tax has seen the progressive side get together, but they have failed to see Abbott still playing the anti-republic card.
Abbott at no stage is really arguing the nitty-gritty merits of his own policy. Why would he? His entire strategy is to win over those who do not believe in climate change and also those who are not sure about the climate change model put forward.
Both the ALP and the Liberal Party are actually in agreement on the reduction target for greenhouse gasses by 2020. Both support a 5 per cent reduction of 2000 levels. Does anyone actually remember the debate over this? This figure is the crucial measure on which the entire carbon tax/direct action debate hangs and yet few voters would have even been aware of the "debate" which resulted in the ALP and Liberal Party being in agreement.
Tony Abbott knows this, and so he ignores it in his attacks on the carbon tax.
Thus we had him in his first interview on Lateline upon becoming leader of the Liberal Party:
TONY ABBOTT: … If you look at Roman times, grapes grew up against Hadrian's Wall - medieval times they grew crops in Greenland. In the 1700s they had ice fairs on the Thames. So the world has been significantly hotter, significantly colder than it is now. We've coped.And yep, the progressives, lo did we laugh, as we did in 1999. But Abbott did not care because science and economics are not his concerns.
Thus we also have him arguing with glee that the carbon tax will have no impact on world temperatures:
We heard from the Government's principal climate change salesman, Professor Flannery, just last Friday that it will not make a difference for a thousand years. It is the ultimate millennium bug. It will not make a difference for a thousand years.Abbot does not care that arguing that a carbon tax reducing Australia's emissions by 5 per cent will have no impact on temperatures also means that reducing emissions by 5 per cent by direct action will also have no impact on temperatures. Caring about that would have been like an anti-republican back in 1999 caring that he was being illogical when arguing that parliament selecting the president was undemocratic.
No the last thing Abbott has wanted is for attention to be on the 5 per cent reduction and for the debate to become about which is the best way to achieve that reduction – because that would mean focus on the Liberal Party's direct action plan.
Nope far better for Abbott to say (as he has quite a lot recently):
Under the carbon tax, Australia's domestic emissions are forecast to be 8 per cent higher by 2020 – not 5 per cent lower – despite a $29 a tonne carbon price. Australia's domestic emissions are forecast to be just 6 per cent lower in 2050 – not 80 per cent – despite a $131 a tonne carbon price. I am not making this up. It's in the Government's own documents.Such talk fits nicely into the arguments of those who think climate change is all a bit of a dodgy left-wing conspiracy and also those who think this may not be the best Carbon Price Modelling.
If you look at the document he is citing, what he doesn't like to point out is that yes, with a carbon price the Treasury predicts domestic emissions will fall to just 6 per cent lower in 2050, but also that it also predicts that without a carbon tax they will be 82 per cent higher (the blue line in the graph).
Why would he not mention this? Well because it actually shows the carbon price will have an impact. Yes we will need to source abatement from overseas, but without a price on carbon we're expected to get to 1,008 million tonnes of emissions in 2050 as opposed to 545 million tonnes with a carbon prices. That is 46 per cent less.
No let's ignore that. Far better to just mention the 6 per cent and say "I am not making this up"!
Tony Abbott has also nicely used the "wait til the Queen dies" gambit that is now frequently mentioned by those in the republic movement – including Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. This is the view that we should wait till Queen Elizabeth dies and then move to a republic. The argument is bollocks and won't work – when it happens her death will result in an outpouring of emotion for the monarchy followed by talk that Charles is not so bad and anyway look it's Will, it's Kate. They're good!
In the Carbon Tax debate this argument has become it's not a good time to introduce a price on carbon – look at Europe, look at America, their economies are in danger. We should wait.
What this means is we should wait until that perfect moment when the world economy is in balance and the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars and THEN we can introduce a carbon price.
Won't ever happen.
Still, maybe some celebrities in favour of a price on carbon will sway opinion? It worked in 1999 didn't it?
All of this keeps attention away from the direct action plan in exactly the same way anti-republicans didn't want you to actually think too much about what a monarchy actually meant – i.e. that some people are better than you just because they are related to the bloke who won the battle of Hastings.
Ask yourself this – how much do you know about the Liberal Party's "direct action" plan?
The Liberal Party aren't at great pains to tell you. Joe Hockey, for example, in a speech on the carbon price legislation that is now on the Liberal Party's website, titles "Carbon Tax - There is a better way" spent only 93 of his 1,975 words actually talking about "the better way".
When Tony Abbott addressed the Australian Steel Convention, he didn't go anywhere near talking about his policy.
Greg Hunt said in a speech earlier this year:
Most importantly, under direct action there will be:If you pause a little, you might start to understand why they don't want you to look too closely. The policy is pure carbon snake oil.
NO cost to families;
NO new taxes; and
NO rise in electricity prices as a consequence of our direct action policy.
Climate change has been the scourge of governments for over a decade. Both sides of politics have struggled because everyone knows that the cut in greenhouse gasses means burning less cheap coal to generate electricity and when you generate electricity with something more expensive it is going to cost more. Yet here Abbott and Hunt and Hockey have stumbled upon a way to achieve a cut in emissions with no pain! None!
Geniuses.
Well now, I stopped believing in something for nothing around the same time I realised Santa Claus couldn't possibly deliver all those presents in just one night.
The price of this genius comes in at $3.2 billion over four years – or an average of $800 million a year.
The biggest policy challenge of our generation, and the Liberals have solved it for around the same amount we provide each year in assistance to East Africa. The Liberal Party likes to mention the $3.2 billion figure. Less used is the $10.5 billion over 10 years (still an incredibly cheap spend) that it will cost.
Greg Hunt and Tony Abbott would tell us "the Coalition's direct action plan is costed, capped and fully funded– reducing emissions without a tax on everything".
The problem of course though is while it is easy to cap a scheme, it is less easy to prove you will get the result you're after for the money spent.
The early reports on them achieving it are not good.
The big ticket of the Liberal's plan is soil carbon – or as Tony Abbott likes to put it "better soils". The problem (apart from the technology being still unproven) is the Liberal's plan involves pricing of this soil carbon at $8-$10 a tonne. Farmers are already saying there's a lot of manure about that price.
In Senate estimates last week the secretary of the Department of Climate Change, Mr Blair Comley, noted that to improve the soil, and thus sequester the soil carbon, farmers will often have to stop or drastically reduce activities such as grazing which was being conducted on that land. Given that, as Mr Comley says, the gross profitability of running cattle on a property comes in around $85 per hectare on average and that if you stop grazing you'll only be able to store about a third of a tonne of carbon, it becomes pretty clear that paying $8-$10 a tonne is not going to cut it.
The problem as well for Tony Abbott is that the republic referendum strategy is based on arguing for the status quo and in July next year, the carbon price will be the status quo. He will then be the one arguing for change. This will likely mean he will need to subject his policy to more scrutiny. He will resist this, because in the end he does not care about the 5 per cent reduction.
He cares about winning the election.
Those who would stop this happening would do well to consider where things went wrong for republicans in 1999 and seek to stop history repeating itself.
Greg Jericho is an amateur blogger who spends too much of his spare time writing about politics and not enough time watching all the DVDs he buys each weekend. His blog can be found here.
The Guradian: Australia's climate scientists expose shock-jock distortion tactics
Academics catalogue the deluge of spin and misinformation of climate science by various Murdoch-owned papers
Editorial practices at News Corp titles have been examined by Australia's climate scientists. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA
Australia has unwittingly become a social experiment. A ruthless experiment on the fate of a society when a single media conglomerate, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, owns 167 newspapers and controls around 70% of the printed media market.
After the phone-hacking scandal rocked Britain, News Corp officials in Australia struggled to put some daylight between its local operations and the rest of the empire, assuring the public that the country was spared phone hacking and other unethical practices. It is perhaps unlikely that wire tapping or phone hacking was practiced in Australia, simply because the local specialty of the Murdoch organs and their shock-jock allies has been a fairly low-tech reliance on outrageous spin.
Nowhere has the reliance on spin been more apparent than during the coverage of the climate "debate" by the Murdoch media and allied shock jocks.
The Australian government is currently seeking to introduce a rather modest tax on carbon, which will have little effect on low-to-moderate income earners, but which will nonetheless help cut emissions, thus finally getting Australia to live up to its historical responsibilities as one of the world's largest per capita carbon emitters and one of the dirtiest producers of power.
The resultant "debate" about the carbon tax has turned into a fact-free brawl that is sufficiently devoid of ethics to make football hooligans blush. Segments of the media, alas, do not blush.
During the recent truck "convoy" that descended upon Parliament Hill in Canberra to protest against the carbon tax, faint memories of Allende's Chile were quickly overpowered by the raging tirade of the presiding shock jock, Alan Jones, who whipped his crowd of truckwits into a frenzy when journalists asked whether he had been paid for his engagement. Not a silly question, given that this individual has been involved in a cash-for-comment scandal before.
This rage has been no isolated incident. At a recent talkfest by vaudevillian denialist Lord Christopher Monckton, a journalist of the ABC was jostled by the hostile crowd.
And despite the robustness of its editorial, the Australian appears remarkably thin-skinned. Its editor-in-chef threatened to sue a former reporter for defamation because she reportedly said writing about climate change at the paper was "absolutely excruciating. It was torture."
In response to all this, and in the absence of politicians with sufficient courage to take on the hate-mongers, some Australian academics have started to provide a platform for accountability by shining a light on the media's practices.
Using the Conversation, the world's first daily paper written primarily by academics in co-operation with journalists, academics are beginning to catalogue the excruciating and tortuous daily distortions of climate science by various papers, especially by the Australian, Murdoch's flagship publication.
This catalogue reveals much that is humorous, albeit involuntarily so.
According to the Australian's front page, a picture of an aged and bronzed Aussie swimmer on an iconic beach is evidence against the threat of sea level rises. Why? Because if 80-year-old Kevin Court hasn't noticed the sea rising, then why bother with satellite data? And because that was so much fun, let's do it again and put the 53-year-old veteran swimmer Lee Boman on the front page a few months later. Two nice blokes in trunks allay all our fears about rising sea levels and prove that climate change is a hoax. Or something like that.
When the technical difficulties and expenditures associated with the procurement of photos become prohibitive, the Australian will happily resort to an internet chain email to present "facts" about CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions. Flagship journalism at its best.
On the odd occasions that practicing scientists are contacted, their statements either disappear without a trace or are distorted beyond recognition. Two months ago, an article on "a deluge of news" jubilantly declared that the "first solid rains for two years have all but broken the drought that has crippled the West Australian grain industry."
Actually, no.
The journalist should have been in possession of information from climatologists that autumn rains had been far below average and drier than last year – which had ended up being the driest on record. Somehow that information was exchanged for the obligatory soothing quote from farmer Brian Cusack in Narembeen, who talked of a "normal year."
Since then, inflow into Perth reservoirs has remained frighteningly minimal and total winter rain has been significantly below average, as explained and predicted by the climatologists months ago.
And all this deluge of spin and misinformation before we even get to the opinion pages of Murdoch's flagship paper. Those opinion pages, offering a smorgasbord of denialist talking points, resemble the event horizon of a black hole.
And all this before we descend into the netherworld of the gutter press and shock jocks.
It must also be noted that the editor-in-chief of the Australian, Chris Mitchell, received the "JN Pierce award for media excellence for leading the newspaper's coverage of climate change policy" in 2009. This annual award is presented by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association.
More recently, the Australian used its considerable moral weight to vow that they would help destroy the Greens at the ballot box. The Greens are the party whose politicians, according to recent research, exclusively rely on scientists to shape their views on climate. In contrast, only 44% of conservative opposition politicians relied on scientists, with the remainder seeking information from other sources – perhaps the cat palmist who opines on climate on TV.
A vow to destroy the party that relies on scientists for scientific advice – how extreme! how radical! – is what many people would call an agenda.
And it is pursuit of that agenda which has arguably contributed to the increasingly fact-free state of Australian public life, in which eruptions of populist rage trump peer-reviewed science, in which climate scientists receive death threats, and in which reporters who practice actual journalism are subject to legal threats.
That is what happens when a media conglomerate and their allies go out of control and escape accountability. The result is a society poised to embark on a Stanford prison experiment.
• Stephan Lewandowsky is a Winthrop professor and Australian professorial fellow at the University of Western Australia. His research addresses the distinction between scepticism and denial and how people respond to misinformation.
| MoreJohn Quiggin | January 3, 2012
In political terms, the issues of climate change and energy took a back seat for most of 2011. There was some modest progress at the Durban conference in December. Moreover, having given up on the idea of cap-and-trade legislation, the Obama administration took some significant regulatory measures including new fuel-economy standards and restrictions on old coal-fired power plants.
The truly significant developments, however, were not driven by politics, although they will have profound political implications. In 2011, nuclear power ceased to be a serious option for meeting the world’s energy needs, and solar photovoltaics (PV) finally became an option worth noting.
The “solar vs. nuclear” dispute had been largely symbolic for several decades. After rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, new installations of nuclear power came to a grinding halt. This was partly a result of safety fears created by the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Economic factors were even more significant. Far from being too cheap to meter, nuclear power turned out to be far more expensive than its main rival, coal, primarily because of unpredictable capital costs and generally high interest rates.
As a result, since 1977, when the River Bend plant in Louisiana commenced construction, not one new nuclear-power plant has been ordered and completed in the United States. The situation in most other developed countries was similar. Only where some combination of military funding and concern about national self-sufficiency allowed for substantial subsidies was there any new construction of nuclear-power plants.
Meanwhile, the case of PV was reminiscent of what used to be said about Brazil as a country of enormous but permanently unfulfilled promise—that is, it seemed PV was doomed always to be the energy source of an ever-receding future. Despite decades of promising press releases from research labs, the average price of PV cells at the beginning of the twenty-first century was more than $5 per installed watt, leading to a cost of more than 50c per kilowatt hour. The global installed base of PV totaled a mere 1.4 gigawatts (GW), about equal to one medium-sized coal or nuclear plant.
But even this modest figure overstated the case, since it refers to the capacity of solar cells. Even in favorable locations, a PV system generates the equivalent of only six hours at full capacity per day, implying an availability factor of about 25 percent, compared to 75 percent for conventional sources. (On the other hand, solar output broadly coincides with peak demand, making the power more valuable.)
The picture changed with the emergence of concerns about climate change and particularly with the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1999. Even in nonsignatory countries such as the United States, it became clear that the days of coal-fired electricity were numbered.
Growing demand for electricity in the late twentieth century was met almost entirely by coal-fired (the United States alone added more than 200 GW) and gas-fired plants.
Economists typically argued that the appropriate response was to put a price on emissions of carbon dioxide and allow markets to decide the appropriate mixture of alternative energy sources, improved energy efficiency and reduced energy use. Governments, however, generally preferred to look for technological solutions.
This search took two main forms. First, there were a wide variety of measures to promote renewable energy, which primarily meant wind and PV. Wind power has historically been cheapest, but its intermittent nature and dependence on specific locations mean that it is unlikely to provide a comprehensive solution. So, there was a strong emphasis on measures designed to promote solar PV, the most notable of which were feed-in tariffs, in which households or firms that installed PV systems received a payment for the electricity they generated, typically well in excess of the prevailing market price.
The other big initiative was an attempt to restart the nuclear industry, referred to somewhat grandiloquently as “the nuclear renaissance.” The idea was to promote a streamlined regulatory process for a small set of standardized designs. These designs, it was hoped, would address the safety concerns that had plagued older systems and reduce the time and cost of construction. In the United States, the big initiatives were the Nuclear Power 2010 program, unveiled in 2002, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which authorized $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. All of these initiatives were carried on and extended by the Obama administration, which proposed in January 2010 to triple federal loan guarantees.
For some years, neither of these approaches bore much fruit. Although installations of solar PV grew, the price remained stubbornly high. This was partly because the industry outgrew its low-cost source of polysilicon, taken from offcuts for wafers made for the semiconductor industry. As late as 2009, the average price of modules was above $4.50/watt. Prices began falling thereafter, and by the beginning of 2011 had fallen more than 20 percent.
The unexpectedly rapid fall in prices meant that the subsidies embodied in early feed-in tariff schemes were now absurdly generous. Households and firms rushed to take them up, and governments, in response, scrambled to scale back their generosity. The process, along with rapid growth in installations, produced a boom and bust cycle in the industry of which Solyndra (which failed in 2011) was the most famous, but far from the only, casualty.
Meanwhile, after an initial rush of enthusiasm proposals for new nuclear plants ran into economic reality. When the deadline set under the Nuclear Power 2010 program expired, twenty-six proposals had been received by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But by the beginning of 2011, more than half of these had been abandoned, and ground had been broken on only two sites, with a total of four reactors.
The nuclear renaissance was already tottering, but the disaster of Fukushima was the coup de grâce. It’s true, as nuclear advocates have argued, that the plants at Fukushima were old and that a disaster as big as the March tsunami was hard to plan for. No doubt the failures in cooling and containment systems that gave rise to the present crisis can be overcome and reactor designs modified to improve safety.
But safety doesn’t come cheap, and redesigns mean delays. With no prospect of any further increases in subsidies and loan guarantees, it seems likely that most of the proposals for new nuclear-power plants in the United States will be abandoned. And, if only for reasons of diversification and speed of construction, the lost Japanese reactors will probably be replaced by gas-fired plants, with some renewables. Meanwhile the Europeans, who were reconsidering nuclear power, have moved decisively in the other direction. Even China has scaled back its targets for nuclear construction and extended the timescale, effectively halving the proposed rate of construction. Such a modest program will not produce the scale economies and operating experience needed to generate a substantial reduction in the cost of nuclear power over the next two decades.
Meanwhile, the cost of PV has already fallen well below that of nuclear and is set to fall further. The average retail price of solar cells as monitored by the Solarbuzz group fell from $3.50/watt to $2.43/watt over the course of the year, and a decline to prices below $2.00/watt seems inevitable. For large-scale installations, prices below $1.00/watt are now common. In some locations, PV has reached grid parity, the cost at which it is competitive with coal or gas-fired generation. More generally, it is now evident that, given a carbon price of $50/ton, which would raise the price of coal-fired power by 5c/kWh, solar PV will be cost-competitive in most locations.
The declining price of PV has been reflected in rapidly growing installations, totalling about 23 GW in 2011. Although some consolidation is likely in 2012, as firms try to restore profitability, strong growth seems likely to continue for the rest of the decade. Already, by one estimate, total investment in renewables for 2011 exceeded investment in carbon-based electricity generation.
The stunning decline in the cost of PV has critical implications for the debate over climate policy. It is now clear that the cost of decarbonizing the economy, and the associated economic disruption, will be far lower than was suggested by previous estimates and even by many recent estimates that use out-of-date cost estimates. In this context, the continued adherence of most U.S. Republicans to conspiracy theories, in which the science of climate change is a cover designed to bring about radical economic and social change, is even more nonsensical than before. Perhaps 2012 will be the year when sanity finally prevails on this issue.
John Quiggin is the Hinkley Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University and an Australian Research Council Federation fellow at the University of Queensland. He is author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton University Press, 2010).
