Murry Salby was sacked from Macquarie University, and Macquarie struggled to explain why, among other things, it was necessary to abandon, and strand him in Paris and hold a “misconduct” meeting in his absence. Since then he has been subject to attacks related to his previous employment. I’ve asked him to respond, which he has at length in a PDF here. The figures listed below refer to that PDF, which encompasses 15 years of events.
I don’t have the resources (unlike the National Science Foundation, the NSF) to investigate it all, but wanted to give Murry the right of reply. On closer inspection the NSF report used by people to attack Salby does not appear to be the balanced, impartial analysis I would have expected. Indeed the hyperbolic language based on insubstantial evidence is disturbing to say the least. Because of the long detailed nature of this I cannot draw conclusions, except to say that any scientist who responds to a question about Murry Salby’s work with a reference to his employment is no scientist.
Remember the NSF report was supposedly an inhouse private document. It was marked “Confidential”, subject to the Privacy Act, with disclosure outside the NSF prohibited. In the end, a confidential, low standard, internal document with legalistic sounding words, may have been “leaked” to those in search of a character attack.
My summary of his reply
First and foremost, there is nothing in any of the NSF claims that questions Murry Salby’s scientific research. This is about paperwork and whether bureaucratic procedures have been properly followed, not about his science.
There is another side to the story and a long and complex history regarding Murry Salby’s work at Colorado University (CU). It started way back in 1997 when he noticed funds were going missing from his NSF-funded research group. After requests for their return were ignored, he reported it to the NSF. By 2003 it reached the stage where the NSF launched a criminal investigation into Colorado University for misappropriation of research funds. The investigation stopped when $100,000 was returned to Salby’s group. Salby was unable to find out where half those missing funds had been placed during the time they had been missing. Possibly this did not make him friends at CU.
Later after Salby left CU in 2008 to come to Australia, Colorado University withheld his computer files and work. After requests for those were also ignored, he launched a case from Australia, and won access to everything — CU paid legal costs as well. Curiously, soon after Salby launched that case, the NSF revived a dormant scientific investigation against Murry which went on to make some extremely serious claims — claims that Salby completely disputes (see his full letter).
Salby had already moved to Australia when the NSF investigation was revived, so he could not apply for any more NSF grants. He explains that given the expense and distance, there was little point in launching a major legal protest to a debarment from funding that he was no longer eligible for in any case.
Hyperbole and tenuous reasoning?
At a glance, anyone reading the NSF report might come away thinking Salby “fabricated” time-sheets, a rather serious accusation. Yet on page 30 of the NSF document, even the Acting Deputy Director of the NSF admitted there was “insufficient evidence to support this allegation”.
NSF Report, Deputy Director Cora B. Marrett, p 30
The time and effort reports were a key point, mentioned more than 20 times, and referred to in dramatic language with words like “inaccurate”, “fabricated” and “fraudulent”. The allegation over the time sheets were described as “The most egregious act…” in the report. Other points also hinged on this point for which evidence was “insufficient”.
The report even goes so far as to declare they were “separately created years after the fact”. How did such a serious and unsupported claim become written all through the final report?
For the record, Salby notes that timesheets were filed years earlier by his administrative staff, who kept them on file and later invoiced his hours (see his Fig 2a and Fig 3). Salby wonders why the NSF did not pursue those records more diligently, and if the cumulative hours were so unbelievable why they found no fault when they were originally submitted.
As for evidence, apparently the NSF report authors thought that Salby’s hours were “highly implausible”, saying that scientists would not work 14 -16 hours stretches for three months at a time. This may be true for administrators, but it is not necessarily so for scientists. Those hours are unusual, but not implausible for a dedicated researcher.
The real cost of moral-vanity, of name-calling, poor reasoning, selecting one’s evidence, and the triumph of doing things because they “feel-good” rather than because of the cold hard numbers, is measured in the trillions. This disaster was entirely foreseeable, totally predictable, and completely unnecessary.
Thanks to Benny Peiser and The Australian, the utter folly is laid bare.
AS country after country abandons, curtails or reneges on once-generous support for renewable energy, Europe is beginning to realise that its green energy strategy is dying on the vine. Green dreams are giving way to hard economic realities.
Slowly but gradually, Europe is awakening to a green energy crisis, an economic and political debacle that is entirely self-inflicted.
The media is finally starting to do what it should have done ten years ago:
A study by British public relations consultancy CCGroup analysed 138 articles about renewables published during July last year in the five most widely circulated British national newspapers: The Sun, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, which enjoy a combined daily circulation of about 6.5 million.
“The analysis revealed a number of trends in the reporting of renewable energy news,” the study found. “First and foremost, the temperature of the media’s sentiment toward the renewables industry is cold. More than 51 per cent of the 138 articles analysed were either negative or very negative toward the industry.”
The flagrantly wasted resources are simply obscene:
EU members states have spent about €600 billion ($882bn) on renewable energy projects since 2005, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Germany’s green energy transition alone may cost consumers up to €1 trillion by 2030, the German government recently warned.
That this kind of waste and mismanagement should have occurred under Western Governments when the financial nonsense of it was obvious long before the money was spent, stands as an argument against Big-Government and a warning of where gullible Green economics leads. Real people have toiled fruitlessly across Europe to pay for these ridiculous schemes. Their quality of life reduced by the failure of big-government, of mentally weak, ethically bankrupt academics, of poorly trained overconfident poseur journalists.
Germany is a Green basketcase:
German’s electricity bills have doubled since 2000. (Germans pay about 40c a KWH.)
Up to 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because they couldn’t pay their bills.
Germany’s renewable energy levy rose from €14bn to €20bn in one year as wind and solar expanded. German households will pay a renewables surcharge of €7.2bn this year alone.
Germany has more than half the worlds solar panels. They generated 40% of Germany’s peak electricity demand on June 6, but practically 0% during the darkest weeks of winter.
Seimens closed it’s entire solar division, losing about €1bn. Bosch is getting out too, it has lost about €2.4bn.
Solar investors have lost almost about €25bn in the past year. More than 5,000 companies associated with solar have closed since 2010.
Germany has phased out nuclear, but is adding 20 coal fired stations. Gas power can’t compete with cheap coal or subsidized renewables and 20% of gas power plants are facing shutdown.
Despite the river of money paid to renewables, emissions have risen in Germany for the last two years.
It’s a case of lose-lose all around, everyone — taxpayers, investors, renewables companies, gas companies — all lost. Waste and stupidity on a colossal scale.
The pattern is similar in the rest of the EU:
Two weeks ago the Czech Government has decided to end all subsidies.
Spain owes €126bn to renewable energy investors.
In Spain more than 5,000 solar entrepreneurs face bankruptcy without the subsidies.
EU leaders now officially list affordable energy as being more important than greenhouse emissions.
None of this even counts the flow-on effects of expensive energy — how much was lost from European manufacturing which could not compete? Investors are “pouring money into the US, where energy prices have fallen to one-third of those in the EU, thanks to the shale gas revolution.”
This is burning money on a scale that only Big-Government can manage, misdirected malinvestment so “successful” that we can only guess how many people have lost jobs, lost years of work, and in the case of homes without electricity, lost lives.
Peter Lang adds up the numbers from the Treasury and leading economic commentators, and finds that decisions the Australian Labor Government has made will cost the equivalent of about $17,000 for every man, woman and child if paid in a lump sum now, or $58,000 if paid bit by bit over the next 37 years to 2050. And that’s just for the ETS, not for the RET and other measures.
By 2019 Alan Moran estimates each year citizens would have to fork out billions for Green Schemes; Labor policies tally to $22b, Coalition policies to $7b, Greens policies to $27b.
If men-in-black-suits turned up at Australian houses forcing citizens to sign cheques for $17,000 per person in order to change the weather on Earth 100 years from now, there would be a revolt in the streets. That’s $68k per household of four. (Is this how you would spend $68 grand?) But if the government disguises those charges in electricity bills, and hidden increases in the cost of every item that has to be moved, heated or cooled, then some 30-40% of the nation sees no reason not to vote for this. In fact, some really want it. It is all a PR game.
So much so, I am surprised the fans of big-government have not managed to stop news outlets and bloggers from speaking the truth yet. To maintain the cloak of confusion, Finklestein-mark-II must be high on future big-government agendas.
All this expense, for next to no benefit even if their broken models were right. Who is going to want to be associated with this financial Titanic when it goes under? (Which could be the next few years, if temperatures follow past cycles.)
– Jo
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Guest Post by Peter Lang
The ultimate cost of Australian “carbon” policies
The emissions trading scheme (ETS) and the Renewable Energy Target (RET) if not repealed would cost:
That is $58,000 for every person living in Australia now (assuming 23 million population). This is what it will cost if we pay at current prices in installments over the 37 years to 2050. However, the discounted cost ¡§C i.e., for those who choose to pay a lump sum up front and ¡®no more to pay¡¡¥ (assuming no more changes to the rules) – is $17,000 per person (or $68,000 for a family of four). In return for this up front payment you hope to get $5,400 per person of benefits, as climate damages avoided, over the period to 2050.
How many are prepared to pay $17,000 per person as a lump sum now, or prepared to pay $58,000 over 37 years, in the hope of gaining an intangible benefit of $5,400 in ¡®reduced climate damages¡¡¥ over the next 37 years?
But the ETS is just part of the cost we are committed to pay to reduce ¡®carbon pollution¡¡¥. Another is the Renewable Energy Target.
RET cost to 2020
Large Renewable Energy Target (LRET) and Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES)
LRET [iv] increases from 16,763 GWh in 2012 to 41,000 GWh in 2020. Assume average price over the period will be $60 for the reasons outlined by Robert Gottliebsen [v], then the total cost for 2012 to 2020 is $13.6 billion.
Was someone at SkepticalScience plotting to pretend evil skeptics created these pictures? (… surely not.)
Brandon Schollenberger found them on the SkS forum. Admire the effort taken to get the SkS penguins, the leaf insignia on the hat, the lapels, the button…
Reichstuhrer J.Cook
Or lo, is this just the weekend fun of teenagers let loose with photoshop? Looks like.
Spartans for Science, Watts, Monckton and Delingpole
Anthony Watts has a larger set (and a pretty good six-pack too) which is “lucky” (sort of), because not long after he posted the first few, the images disappeared from their original links. In a true SkS logical maneuver they were moved to …/images/a11gon3 (images “allgone”), which took real skeptics about five minutes to find. That set have gone too now (except for the 400 copies placed all over the Internet).
Antarctic Sea Ice has hit it’s 23rd daily record for the year. (Thanks to Sunshine Hours for tracking these things.)
2013 is the red line. (click to enlarge)
In terms of the number of daily records in a year, the Big Year for sea-ice was 2008 where records occurred on 125 days. 2010 was nearly as “big” when records occurred on 118 days. 2013 is currently in fifth spot. If the tally rises to 28 records this year, it will leap to third place.
Not that any of this matters, of course.
“Sea ice in the Arctic and around Antarctica responds directly to climate change and may, if properly monitored, become increasingly important for detecting climate change.”
IPCC Third Assessment Report, Cryosphere Processes, Box 7.1
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Emotions are running high in Australia. One anonymous commenter has posted over 400 comments here, if he repeats himself, either ignore it, or explain why he’s wrong. Links are appreciated in comments but not ones that don’t even have one line of explanation (eg youtube). We welcome all honest debate from all comers.
CSIRO wants to stop methane emissions: but can they get a grant to stop El Nino’s and cap volcanoes?
This type of trans-Siberian cow used to emit a lot of methane.
Tom Quirk sent me a short note to point out that the big rise in global methane almost certainly was man-made — at least up to the mid 1980’s, but in the last 20 years, the culprit for rising methane appears to be volcanoes and El Ninos. (Note the timing of the spikes in the graph below, as methane pours into the atmosphere some years, but barely changes in most other recent years).
Apparently, the man-made emissions in the 70s and 80s were largely due to leaky pipes in the Soviet Union. Natural gas was dirt cheap up til the mid 1970’s. It was so cheap the Russians didn’t bother to plug those flawed pipes. But as prices rose (and after a big nasty explosion in 1982*) they got serious, fixed the pipes and stopped a lot of the out-gassing.
There are many graphs of atmospheric methane levels showing ominous unnatural rises, but the driving forces become so much clearer if we look closely at the annual change in methane levels. — Jo
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The true story of the drivers of methane
Guest Post: Tom Quirk
Methane is a greenhouse gas associated with grazing animals and decaying plant material in swamps and marshes. It has been claimed as a factor contributing to global warming because of an alleged warming effect that is assumed by the IPCC to be 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. However, when calculated correctly[i] on the basis of atomic weight, the actual multiplier is only 7 and, moreover , the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is about 200 times less that that of CO2. Methane in the atmosphere is broken down to CO2 and water over a period averaging some 12 years.
The CO2-equivalent contribution of methane from grazing animals is estimated by various Australian government agencies to be 5 to 10% of national emissions of greenhouse gases. However, these estimates also show no increase in methane from agricultural emissions over the last 20 years.
Recent research shows that the increase in atmospheric methane levels since about 1940 can be explained by the dramatic increase in natural gas (fossil methane) use and leakage from badly managed transmission and distribution systems in the Northern Hemisphere[ii]. With the improvement of these systems leakage has been reduced and there has only been a slight methane increase since 1990 – the level has in fact varied with El Ninos and La Ninas (Figure 2) and methane from grazing animals has not made a measureable contribution.
This graph shows how much methane changes year by year over the last 1,000 years:
Figure 1: Annual changes in atmospheric methane in parts per billion derived from ice core up to 1990 1990 and direct atmospheric measurements from 1983 to 2011 AD [iii]. Data source CSIRO [iv].
The next graph shows those same annual changes during just the last century:
Figure 2: Annual changes in atmospheric methane in parts per billion derived from direct atmospheric measurements from 1983 to 2011 AD. The annual increase in atmospheric methane from 2000 to 2011 is 2.5 ppb/year, about the rate at the end of the nineteenth century.The peaks in the direct atmospheric measurements reflect the influence of El Ninos. The peak in 1991 is an indirect effect from the eruption at Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991 and the 1998, 2007 and 2010 El Nino’s are marked by dashed lines. Data source CSIRO [iii]
Willie Soon has some fun with the sea-level debate, going back to William the Conqueror, and landmarks in England.
Are sea-levels “accelerating”? Can the satellites resolve sea-level to 1mm changes a year? Why is the raw data so different?
I think the strongest point is the one Nils Axel Morner has made about the extraordinary adjustments in the raw satellite data, which Willie Soon refers too soon after the 20 minute mark.
Willie is always a rapid fire presenter, getting a good response from the audience…
I’d like to know more about Pevensey Castle (7 mins). It was built in 300AD or so, and at the time was a Roman Fort. The sea surrounded it on three sides, now it is 1.5km from the sea. William the Conqueror landed there (or close to it) in 1066. Apparently the water was so high, they used to toss prisoners over the wall and the tide would take their bodies away. Now it is high and dry. Apparently the marshes around the castle have also been actively reclaimed as the land was so valuable. Obviously there are several factors at work. [Google images show how far the sea is now.]
Hydroelectricity is the only renewable that produces any meaningful amounts of energy on a global scale (about 16% of all electricity, compared to the paltry cumulative total from all other renewables of less than 3.5%). Oh the dilemma, hydropower turns out to release more methane than people realized. New research suggests dams are the main source of methane from rivers, and they could potentially lift global freshwater emissions by 7%.
There are 50,000 large dams around the world, but many, many more smaller ones.
Maeck’s team decided to take a look at methane releases from the water impoundments behind smaller dams that store water less than 50 feet deep.
They describe analysis of methane release from water impounded behind six small dams on a European river. “Our results suggest that sedimentation-driven methane emissions from dammed river hot spot sites can potentially increase global freshwater emissions by up to 7 percent,” said the report. It noted that such emissions are likely to increase due to a boom in dam construction fostered by the quest for new energy sources and water shortages.
THE paradox du jour: people who like free markets don’t want a carbon market, and the people who don’t trust capitalism want emissions trading. So why are socialists fighting for a carbon market? Because this “market” is a bureaucrat’s wet dream.
A free market is the voluntary exchange of goods and services. “Free” means being free to choose to buy or to not buy the product. At the end of a free trade, both parties have something they prefer.
[Those who know what real free markets are know that an emissions trading scheme is not and never can be a free market. The “Carbon-Market” is a market with no commodity, no demand, and no supply. Who needs a “carbon credit”? The government entirely determines both supply and demand.]
A carbon market is a forced market. There is little intrinsic incentive to buy a certificate for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. It says a lot about the voluntary value of a carbon credit that when given the option to pay $2 to offset their flight emissions, 88% of people choose not to. A few do it as a form of green penance to assuage guilt, and others do it for their eco public relations campaign or branding.
To create demand for emissions permits, the government threatens onerous fines to force people to buy a product they otherwise don’t need and most of the time would never even have thought of acquiring. Likewise, supply wouldn’t exist without government approved agents. Potentially a company could sell fake credits (cheaper than the real ones) and what buyer could spot the difference? Indeed, in terms of penance or eco-branding, fake credits, as long as they were not audited, would “work” just as well as real ones.
Despite being called a commodity market, there is no commodity: the end result is air that belongs to no-one-in-particular that has slightly-less-of-a-trace-gas. Sometimes it is not even air with slightly less CO2 in it, it is merely air that might-have-had–more-CO2, but doesn’t. It depends on the unknowable intentions of factory owners in distant lands.
How strange, then, that this non-commodity was at one time projected to become the largest tradable commodity in the world – bigger even than the global market for oil. In 2009, Bart Chilton, chairman of energy markets at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, estimated global carbon markets would be worth $2 trillion within five years.
The UN may claim that carbon is “tracked and traded like any other commodity”, but if I buy a tonne of tin, I either get a tonne of tin or I get $20,000 because I onsold it — someone, somewhere gets the goods. If a bulk shipment of coal arrives empty, buyers notice. Fraud is easy to spot.
Unfortunately, fraud has been a big, ongoing problem with emissions trading. This market needs auditors, and the auditors need auditing (the top two auditors in the EU emissions trading scheme were both suspended in 2009 for irregularities). The EU has already lost €5bn to carbon-trading VAT fraud. The mafia are laundering money in Italy through renewables schemes, and after one tax loophole was closed, market volume in Belgium dropped by 90%.
The carbon market also depends on the honesty of people claiming: “We wouldn’t have built that dam without that carbon credit.” How would we know? The Xiaoxi dam in China was already under construction two years before the owners applied for credits “to build it”.
Since an ETS exists by government fiat and has no intrinsic value without it, it is technically a fiat currency rather than a tradeable commodity. Supply and demand is set by bureaucrats in the EU. If the price is too high, politicians will issue more credits, and if it’s too low they will delay them (as the EU is planning to do). Bureaucrats can also give exemptions to trade-affected industries (or their friends, and to their fans in marginal seats).
Those who say that a carbon market is “like” other derivatives markets are wrong. Derivatives markets are sometimes quite disconnected from actual products such as pork bellies or gold bars, but eventually the supply and demand for real goods will determine the price. In some places the size of the derivatives market exceeds that of the commodity market, but that’s a reason to question those schemes, not to set up a market in an atmospheric nullity or something as frivolous as an “intention” not to build a dam.
So, who profits from the carbon market? The brokers in a carbon market – like large financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank, UBS, Morgan Stanley, CBA, Citi, HSBC, Macquarie, – make money on every trade. The global carbon market turned over $176bn in 2011. These groups have been lobbying for a market, not a tax, and the reasons are obvious.
Most of the key factors in a carbon market are misnamed. The market is not free. An essential plant fertiliser is called pollution. The aim of the market is not to make clean energy but to change global temperatures by an amount that rounded to the nearest degree, equals zero*. The US has no market but has reduced emissions (largely thanks to shale gas), while any reductions in EU emissions were largely due to falling GDP. Yet the government wants to join the EU scheme.
Ironically, the reason for having any carbon scheme at all comes from monopolistic research. There are virtually no grants specifically available for sceptical scientists, but funding galore for unsceptical ones.
We need a free market in science before we even discuss the need for a free market in carbon.
[The people who demand a free market in CO2 apparently don’t give a toss about the lack of one in scientific research. Who amongst the carbon market lobbyists and politicians argues that we ought to be funding skeptical scientists? To get a fair hearing in a court, we know we have to fund both sides. Monopolies don’t work in business, and they don’t work in science either. May the best researcher win!]
But don’t hold your breath – the global warmers prove to be mostly global hypocrites.
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Reproduced with permission (though it retains a few edits and phrasings that didn’t fit in the final copy see [..]).
Here’s a graph showing something about Australian, Chinese and Indian emissions (thanks to Tom Quirk). At a glance you might think we are up there with the best of them (doing our bit to fertilize the flora of the planet, and to regreen the deserts). Alas, the Australian tally (the green triangles) represents the total emissions of Australia. The lines depicting Chinese and Indian emissions just show their annual increases.
Chinese annual increases in emissions are larger than the entire Australian output. India is not too far behind.
UPDATE: TonyfromOz points out the Y-axis scale is missing three zero’s. Data source: CDIAC (Thanks Anton).
It appears the new coal fired power stations and cars coming on line in the breakneck-evolution-of-China produced twice the emissions of the entire continent of Australia.
Remember our aim to reduce our national output by 5% or so by 2020. Thanks to the Renewable Energy Target, the Clean Energy Fund, the Remote Indigenous Energy Program, the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program, the Living Greener program, the Regional Natural Resource Management Planning, the Light Vehicle CO2 Emissions Standards, the Household Assistance Package, and not to mention another 36 programs I could have listed as well as the Emissions Trading Scheme (aka Carbon Tax), or the Climate Commission, and a multitude of state based schemes, the Australian citizens will spend billions to reduce that string of green triangles by an amount less than the error bars on a graph of Chinese emissions.*
Roughly speaking (and there’s not much point in being accurate), a 5% reduction in Australian emissions undoes the effect of one week of development in China.
Ask not the value for money you receive. Rest assured that by spending this money Australians are ensuring jobs for Chinese factory workers (albeit possibly in sweatshop conditions) and Australian bureaucrats (who bid against each other for Canberra real estate). We are making sure that if competitive solar energy is possible, someone somewhere will find that and then charge us royalties to buy those products back off them.
This is your brain on big-government funding.
Alas it is not your bank balance.
__________________
*You have to imagine the error bars on this graph. This is Chinese data after all. Look at the noise. There ought to be error bars on the error bars.
When the same model code with the same data is run in a different computing environment (hardware, operating system, compiler, libraries, optimizer), the results can differ significantly. So even if reviewers or critics obtained a climate model, they could not replicate the results without knowing exactly what computing environment the model was originally run in.
This raises that telling question: What kind of planet do we live on? Do we have a Intel Earth or an IBM one? It matters. They get different weather, apparently.
There is a chaotic element (or two) involved, and the famous random butterfly effect on the planet’s surface is also mirrored in the way the code is handled. There is a binary butterfly effect. But don’t for a moment think that this “mirroring” is useful: these are different butterflies, and two random events don’t produce order, they produce chaos squared.
How important are these numerical discrepancies? Obviously it undermines our confidence in climate models even further. We can never be sure how much of the rising temperature in a model forecasts might change if we moved to a different computer. (Though, since we already know the models are using the wrong assumptions about relative humidity, and are proven wrong, missing hot-spot an’ all, this is like adding sour cream to a moldy cake. We were never going to eat it anyway).
This is what 90% certain looks like.
The cheapest way to lower global climate sensitivity might be to switch operating systems in climate lab computers.
The monster complexity of climate models means they never had a chance of actually solving the climate in the foreseeable future, but that makes them ideal to issue unverifiable pronouncements from The Mount. At the same time it cultivates the endless grant-getting-cash-cow, always in need of bigger computer arrays: more code, more conferences, more computers!
In a nutshell, this new study adds numbers and detail to a home truth that the grown ups in the room know already. Basically humans want cheap energy. The free market, powered by human creativity and mass demand, will always find ways to circumvent national policies that try to force people to use more expensive energy.
In the absence of a global ruler (Copenhagen anyone?), the only way to reduce fossil fuel use is to invent or discover a better energy source. Any other national policy is simply pushing rocks uphill, like poor old Sisyphus. Manufacturing will always move to countries where cheap energy is still available.
Researchers Andrew, Davis and Peters conclude that national climate and “carbon” policies are becoming less effective every year
Global trade in energy intensive goods is growing faster than global trade in carbon credits. So as some countries slow production and reduce their emissions, they are simply buying those goods instead from other countries. The energy is still used to make the goods, but it’s done in countries that have less regulation on carbon emissions.
The figure 1 graph below is one of the most information dense graphs around. It’s a story of global geostrategic transformation (click to enlarge). It shows which countries are the largest extractors, producers, and consumers of fossil fuels, and whether they use it domestically or provide it for export. The US was the largest source of fossil fuels (bigger than China and the middle East) but since 2004 has shrunk to be smaller than both. It was the largest “producer” in 2007 but China was catching up so fast that I suspect it will lose the top dog status there too. The US is still the largest consumer and half of that consumption is now imported. Australia is so insignificant it scores a couple of reddish bars in “extraction”, but does not even rate a mention for production or consumption.
Figure 1: (Click to enlarge) Fossil-fuel CO2 emissions, 1997–2007, allocated to each of the three accounting points: (a) extraction (highlighting emissions embodied in domestic consumption and those consumed elsewhere), (b) combustion (highlighting whether the fuel was extracted domestically or elsewhere), and (c) consumption (also highlighting whether the fuel was extracted domestically or elsewhere). Countries in the EU27 are grouped.
Nothing succeeds in flagrant waste quite like Big-Government.
Following in Soviet footsteps with gusto, politicians of all persuasions manage business failure on a grand scale. Did you miss yet another case-study on 7:30 report from last week (see the segment there)?
A mass of taxpayer-funded forests designed to make Australia self sufficient in plantation timber and paper are now being burned by land owners as the companies running the schemes collapse amid allegations of rorting, fraud and mismanagement.
The Howard government made plantations a tax deductable investment, and then the Rudd and Gillard governments made it even worse — broadening the rules in 2008 to include trees for “carbon sequestration” (which perversely could still be logged). Lo and behold, two and a half million acres of taxpayer funded forests were planted. What could possibly go wrong? Just a few things:
1. The bottom fell out of the timber market. There is no demand for the wood and the trees are not worth harvesting, so the forests are being burnt and the land reclaimed for other purposes.
2. Whole districts of farming communities were upended by the artificial boom and bust, as farmers sold their properties to the plantations, which are now largely broke, collapsed, and mired in legal trouble.
KAREN STEPHENS: Now, you can imagine how you just take 70, 80 jobs out of a community overnight. Nobody came running to us to say, “Can we help Casterton?”
3. As a nation Australia lost the useful products that could have been created from that land. The nation also lost the taxes that would have accrued, both from the investors who avoided paying tax and from the lost opportunities of businesses which might have done something useful with the capital, the land, and the workers.
For example, if all industrialized nations achieve a 100% reduction (that is, stop using coal, oil, gas, diesel, and avgas tomorrow*), then 87 years from now the world will be 0.352C cooler (assuming climate sensitivity is a high 4.5C and the models work, and nothing else changes in the atmosphere).
The great thing is you can adjust the parameters yourself to see how many ways Global Action does not add up.
Calculator from CATO.org (Click to go to the calculator)
Unfortunately it does not also project the costs. Version II perhaps?
*Please forgive me for that sweeping assumption. We all know that to get a true 100% reduction in CO2 emissions we’d need to do a lot more. Like building nuclear plants from handmade mud-bricks using solar powered trucks and wind-powered cranes. And no more flights to anywhere unless you have a pedal powered hang-glider or one of those marvelous solar planes that takes 2 months to cross the US.
Holidays in Hawaii would be for people who like to row (a lot).
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