Posts Tagged ‘environment’
How Australia is faring on global indices
park yourself here?
Many Australians were greatly relieved at the change of Federal government from May 21 2022. Australia hadn’t been faring well on the international stage, especially with respect to the global warming crisis, but also regarding political governance and other issues. Of course the Labor government has only been in office for three months, so I don’t expect judgements to have turned around significantly at this point. The purpose of this piece is to describe Australia’s position on a number of international surveys, and then to return to those surveys in about twelve months’ time to see if and how the view of Australia internationally has changed.
I was motivated to write this by a passage in David Brophy’s book China Panic, in which he mentioned two such international surveys, the CIVICUS monitor, which apparently measures democratic credentials, and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. I’d never heard of these surveys, which is hardly surprising for a dilettantish autodidact. Three surveys I have monitored are the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the OECD’s Better Life Index and the UN’s Human Development Index. So now we have five, and counting. What follows is my attempt to summarise their most current findings.
The CIVICUS monitor. CIVICUS is, as far as I can tell, not an acronym. Based in Johannesburg, the organisation describes itself as:
a global alliance of civil society organisations and activists dedicated to strengthening citizen action and civil society throughout the world…. Our definition of civil society is broad and covers non-governmental organisations, activists, civil society coalitions and networks, protest and social movements, voluntary bodies, campaigning organisations, charities, faith-based groups, trade unions and philanthropic foundations. Our membership is diverse, spanning a wide range of issues, sizes and organisation types.
According to Brophy, the CIVICUS monitor downgraded Australia’a democratic status (in the broad sense described above) from ‘open’ to ‘narrowed’ in 2019. The latest findings, from 2021, are unchanged. To explain, the monitor divides the world’s nations into 5 levels, which, top to bottom, are open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed. On further inspection, I’ve found that there’s a ‘live rating’, last updated for Australia on 25/5/22, a few days after the election. Hopefully things will have improved by 2023. To compare a few other countries – New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Uruguay, Suriname, Taiwan, Portugal and most Northern European countries are classed as ‘open’. Other ‘narrowed’ countries include Namibia, Italy, France, the UK, Japan and Bulgaria. Obstructed countries include the USA, Brazil, South Africa, Ukraine, Poland, Indonesia and Morocco. A colour-coded map provides an at-a-glance reference to any country of interest. The repressed and closed countries can generally be guessed at. China, Vietnam and most Middle Eastern counties are classed as ‘closed’.
The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The CPI is a product of Transparency International, which advertises itself thus:
Transparency International is a global movement working in over 100 countries to end the injustice of corruption. We focus on issues with the greatest impact on people’s lives and hold the powerful to account for the common good. Through our advocacy, campaigning and research, we work to expose the systems and networks that enable corruption to thrive, demanding greater transparency and integrity in all areas of public life.
First set up in 1993 by an ex-World Bank official, Peter Eigen and like-minded associates, first-hand witnesses of global corruption, the organisation was established in then recently re-unified Berlin.
An article in The Conversation, posted in late January 2022, points out that in 2012 Australia ranked level with Norway in 7th position as to ‘cleanness’. The 2021 index, to which The Conversation refers, sees Australia as having slipped to 18th while Norway has risen to 4th, out of 180 countries. Much of what Brophy writes in China Panic is an account of why the country I happen to have ended up in has fallen so far so fast. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which publishes the Democracy Index, is one of the sources for this index, along with Freedom House and the World Justice Project. The three equal top countries on this index are New Zealand, Denmark and Finland, and the bottom three are Somalia, Syria and South Sudan. Anyway, re Australia, this one will be worth watching over the next few years.
The Democracy Index. I’ve written about the Democracy Index, inter alia, in a previous piece. It’s produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, associated with The Economist magazine in the UK. Here’s their raison d’être blurb:
The EIU Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of world democracy for 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime
Australia ranks a fairly creditable 9th on the Democracy Index list for 2021, well below NewZealand (2nd) but also well above the country we’ve been showing so much allegiance to in recent decades, the USA, which ranks 26th and is considered a flawed democracy. According to the index’s ratings, the world is inching towards hell in a hand basket – 70% of the world’s nations have become less democratic in the last twelve months, and this downward trend has prevailed for some years. Australia, though, has been faring worse than most. I don’t have access to the previous rankings, but each nation is given an annual score out of ten. Australia’s 2021 score is 8.90, compared to 8.96 in 2020. The score has regularly dropped from a high of 9.22 in the years 2010-2012, the period of the Rudd-Gillard Labor Prime Ministerships.
The OECD Better Life Index. This measures the ‘life experience’ of an ‘elite’ group of about 40 of the world’s wealthiest countries, members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, according to eleven different criteria, including education, environment, safety and health. When I first accessed the index, about 6 or 7 years ago, Australia was ranked number 2 across all criteria, behind the ever-triumphant Norway, and well ahead of the US in around 12th spot. Currently Australia is ranked 7th, and the USA 8th. Norway still ranks first.
On looking into Australia’s ranking for each criterion (the 11 criteria are housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance) I can’t help but scratch my head at some of the results. Australia ranks 1st for ‘civic engagement’, but 20th for ‘community’ (!!??). I would have thought that one entails the other. Also, Australia ranks 2nd for housing (but city rental has become unaffordable for most young people), and 2nd for education, which again surprises me from a general persecutive, though our post-grad sector definitely punches above its weight. At the other end of the spectrum, Australia ranks 30th for safety, another surprise. The OECD claims that the average homicide rate for member countries is 2.6 per 100,000 inhabitants. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia’s homicide rate for 2019-20 was 1.02 per 100,000, the highest in nearly ten years, but clearly well below the OECD average. Of course, homicide is only one measure, but I’ve not heard of Australia having a high crime rate in general. Strange. But the worst ranking is 33rd for work-life balance!? But having rarely worked a day in my life, I couldn’t possibly comment.
The UN Human Development Index (HDI). Here’s the blurb about this one:
The Human Development Index, or HDI, is a metric compiled by the United Nations and used to quantify a country’s “average achievement in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living.” Human Development Index value is determined by combining a country’s scores in a vast and wide-ranging assortment of indicators including life expectancy, literacy rate, rural populations’ access to electricity, GDP per capita, exports and imports, homicide rate, multidimensional poverty index, income inequality, internet availability, and many more.
The HDI website only provides information from 2019 and places Australia in a tie with The Netherlands at 8th in the world, with a score of .944 on a scale from 0 to 1. Norway again gets top spot, just ahead of Ireland and Switzerland. Interestingly, Australia ranks higher than four countries it likes to compare itself with, the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, but little explanation is given for the ranking, which appears to be have been stable for a few years.
So, to summarise, I don’t know what to make of all these indices, which I suspect subtly influence each other in their ratings. We appear to always make the top ten, but rarely the top 5. If we could take advantage of our climate and resources to be be a greater power in renewables, instead of lagging (except in domestic rooftop solar) as we have done over the last decade, we could really make the world pay more attention to us, for better or worse.
References
David Brophy, China Panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/#/11111111111
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hdi-by-country
clothing: when a solution becomes a problem
Canto: So we talked previously about the horror of stilettos, which was all about the absurdity of fashion, and the sad fate of fashion victims, sigh, but fashion, and the clothing industry in general has lots of problems at the production end as well as for the end-users.
Jacinta: Yes – of course at the user end there’s the huge problem of waste. I walked past a nearby Salvos shop on the weekend, and their donation bins were overflowing to a ridiculous degree, piled up in the doorway, and neighbouring doorways, extending a long way down the street.
Canto: At least people are trying to recycle, but I wouldn’t like the job of sorting that stuff out. And of course the people who do that job are volunteers, though living in a country with a reasonable safety net and a minimum wage which is one of the highest in the world according to this Australian Industry Group website. But wages and conditions, as well as our buying habits, especially those of your fellow female primates, are what I want to focus on today.
Jacinta: So women, especially teens, buy these cheap foreign-made clothes from overseas sweat-shops, wear them once or twice and chuck them out – they call it ‘fast fashion’ – and the cycle continues. A handful at the top are making tons of money, while others are getting sick from overwork or from ingesting toxic chemicals. Petrochemical-based textiles now make up 10% of the world’s carbon emissions and rising. They also add to the biosphere’s growing microplastics problem. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 35% of microplastics come from these textiles.
Canto: I should point out another issue with ‘fast fashion’. When the fashion changes, which it does on an almost weekly basis, the brand names, such as H&M, Topshop, PrettyLittleThing and please don’t make me name any more, they just dump them.
Jacinta: Yes, but not in recycling bins. Only about 1% of textile waste is currently recycled, for all sorts of reasons, such as the technology required to separate blended chemical textiles. They can be shipped to India or African countries, but that just delays the problem briefly.
Canto: It’s kind of fascinating how many problems we make for ourselves by becoming supposedly more sophisticated, manufacturing and then dumping all these techno-solutions. We’re the only mammals that wear clothes, and as with footwear, it’s hard to say exactly when all that began, never mind when it all morphed into competitive fashion shite.
Jacinta: Actually we can only say that we’re the only extant mammals to wear clothes. An associated question is, when did we start, and finish, losing our body hair? Here’s an interesting quote from one Charles Darwin:
No one supposes that the nakedness of the skin is any direct advantage to man; his body, therefore, cannot have been divested of hair through natural selection.
He thought it was a matter of sexual selection. Do we find hairless bodies more attractive? Maybe, but probably not universally. Today we undoubtedly find bonobo/chimp/gorilla-type hair unattractive, but that’s surely because we associate it with non-human primates. Many women I know find men with hairy legs quite the turn-on.
Canto: But not furry legs. They have to be humanly hairy. So maybe there was a natural advantage to being less hairy. The move into open, sunlit spaces seems to have been key. If you’re covered in hair, it reduces heat loss through the skin. Also, being upright exposed less of the body surface to the sun. Probably explains why we keep the hair on our heads, to protect those heads, and the ever-expanding brains inside them, from getting fried.
Jacinta: And in the cooler regions, and during cooler eras, and at night, we could supplement our hair with artificial coverings, proto-clothing. But in those regions and times, plenty of hair would be an advantage. But anyway, for some reason, our ancestors started losing their body hair. I wonder when, exactly.
Canto: There’s probably no exactly. But upright stature helped in hunting, allowing us to run long distances, in which case losing heat through sweating would’ve been advantageous. Remember, it would’ve been easier to keep warm, through covering, than to cool down, with all that hair.
Jacinta: They could stay in the shade, like bonobos do.
Canto: Big-brained humans require too much energy for their owners to spend time under yum-yum trees. We have lots of sweat glands compared to other primates. It helps us to run fast and long. Those monkeys that have more sweat glands than others are also fast movers. There are some puzzles about all this, though, about what came first and why – reduced hair, bipedalism, larger brain.
Jacinta: But getting back to modern clothing and fast fashion and the like – or maybe not modern clothing. I’m thinking, when did clothing become mandatory. Maybe it’s not manatory in all cultures, but among our European forebears, how did it manage to become grossly offensive to go about naked like our bonobo cousins? It seems to have happened very recently in paleontological terms. I mean it’s associated with civilised behaviour somehow.
Canto: Only ‘savages’ went about in the altogether. Or ancient Greek actors and athletes. Of course, clothing quickly became a hierarchical thing – the higher-ups dressed more elaborately, and the proles weren’t allowed to, and so were despised for their shabbiness. Being completely naked was real low-life stuff, and a sexual element evolved alongside all of that. And a gender element.
Jacinta: That’s going a bit fast, perhaps, but I’m sure it’s on the right track. So I’ve found various sites discussing this issue of hiding our genitals. John Romero provides a pretty comprehensive account, of clothing in general as well as our new age modesty. He reminds us, for example, that nakedness among the Greeks wasn’t confined to performers and athletes. Public baths were communal, as were Roman toilets – they didn’t blush when they flushed. Actually, they didn’t flush, at least not the way we do. Of course the creation myth of Judeo-Christianity, which had small beginnings but soon spread throughout Europe and the globe, had Adam and Eve feel ashamed when they realised they were naked, but it doesn’t explain the realisation, since they were the only humans on the planet at the time apparently. Nevertheless, this association with nakedness and shame was hammered home by church authorities, and has much to do with current attitudes.
Canto: But the association between nudity and shame was clearly felt by those early biblical writers. That dates it to around 2,600 years ago at most, though religious biblical scholars generally prefer an older date.
Jacinta: We just don’t have any way of dating the origin of nudity as shameful. Clothing is only the most obvious way of concealing nudity, but the origin of clothing surely has nothing to do with shame. And nobody really knows when clothing originated, or when we lost our body hair, which was clearly a gradual process. But to return to our arguably over-dressed, throwaway modern society – which often plays with modesty in a titillating way…
Canto: Modesty’s a tricky word though. Isn’t wearing showy expensive clothing a kind of immodesty?
Jacinta: I was thinking of the skin-tight fashion of young women – I don’t know about the price. Not that I disapprove, I’m only concerned with the waste.
Canto: Better for the environment if they go about naked, you’re right.
Jacinta: Hmmm…
References
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160801-our-weird-lack-of-hair-may-be-the-key-to-our-success
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-humans-initially-start-to-hide-their-privates-from-other-humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing
fracking hell
A very very brief piece in New Scientist back in August reported some research to the effect that hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking, is mostly responsible for a rise in atmospheric methane since 2008.
Having just spotted this today, I was somewhat shocked. I’ve heard news about fracking of course, and the damage report has grown – but it seemed to me mostly about local geological instability, overuse of water, and site pollution. So what’s the methane issue?
National Geographic reports on the same research (published in the journal Biogeosciences) here. Methane is a major greenhouse gas, of course, heating the atmosphere as much as eighty times the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, but the question surely is – just how much methane does fracking release?
The NG article also mentions a 2015 NASA study that found a sharp rise in methane levels from 2006, growing by about 25 million tons per year. It calculated that at least half of this increase came from fossil fuels. These findings happen to coincide with the growth in the use of fracking technology from around that time. Most of the emissions come from shale gas – that’s mostly methane – operations in the USA and Canada. The article describes the process:
Fracking involves drilling an oil or gas well vertically and then horizontally into a shale formation. A mixture of highly pressurized water, chemicals, and sand is injected to create and prop open fissures, or pathways for the gas to flow
But as more has become known about fracking, opposition has grown. While most fracking is done in the USA and Canada, a number of US states have either banned the practice or are considering doing so. It’s banned in France and Germany, and has become a hot issue in Australia, with the ‘unconventional gas’ producers, mostly operating in Queensland, seeking to expand operations throughout much of northern Australia. The NT government decided to lift its moritorium on fracking in 2018 after a comprehensive enquiry claimed that fracking could be brought to safe levels if 135 recommendations were followed. The government promised to follow the recommendations, of course, but the process smells horribly of back-door dealing. And in the USA the Trump anti-administration is doing all it can to further the practise, auctioning off drilling rights in large swathes of land to oil and gas developers.
It seems to me that fracking is by its nature a short-term, stop-gap technology, which seeks to ferret out smaller and smaller reserves through applying more and more pressure, risking increasing damage to the environment, and to the health of local people exposed to under-reported leakages of the 650 or so chemicals used in the process, many of them well-recognised carcinogens. Australia’s Business Insider website has an article on the 10 scariest chemicals that have been used in hydraulic fracking. They are: methanol, BTEX compounds (benzene, toluene, xylene and ethylbenzene), diesel fuel, lead, hydrogen fluoride, naphthalene, sulphuric, crystalline silica, formaldehyde and ‘other unknown chemicals’. Now it’s likely true that any operations which employ chemicals would be found wanting under scrutiny, but it’s also true that the fracking industry, especially in the USA currently, operates under very little oversight, and will be seeking maximum benefit from a rogue regime. And it seems to me that some science-based organisations, such as the US Geological Survey, are minimising the damage and extolling the virtues, always pointing out that risks will be minimal ‘if proper practises are in place’. That’s an impossibly big ‘if’ when talking about the USA’s current dictatorship.
References
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/scary-chemicals-used-in-hydraulic-fracking-2012-3#methanol-1
some chatter on the National Energy Guarantee and our clouded energy future
Sanjeev Gupta – making things happen
Canto: I think we need to get our heads around the National Energy Guarantee, the objections to it, and the future of energy in Australia – costs, viability, environmental issues and the like.
Jacinta: Oh no. So what is the National Energy Guarantee?
Canto: Well if we go to the government’s website on this we’ll get a spinned version, but it’s a start. They say it’s an attempt to guarantee reliability, affordability, baseload security, reduced emissions and further investment into the nation’s energy system. They describe it as a market-based, technology-neutral response to the Finkel Review. They estimate a savings of around $120 between 2020 and 2030.
Jacinta: Sounds a bit vague.
Canto: Well there’s quite a bit of vagueness on their website frankly, but they present information on future projects, such as Snowy 2.0, which sound exciting but we’ll have to wait and see.
Jacinta: So, going to our favourite website on these matters, Renew Economy, I find outrage from the renewable energy sector about the latest government decision on the NEG:
Federal Coalition MPs voted on Tuesday [August 14] to support the National Energy Guarantee that proposes to ensure no new investment in large-scale wind, solar or battery storage for nearly a decade, and also expressed their support for a new government initiative they hope will support new coal-fired generation.
A lot of the critics’ ire is directed at modelling by the ESB (Energy Security Board) – established a year ago ‘to coordinate the implementation of the Finkel reform blueprint’ – which fails to account for major state and corporate investments in renewables.
Canto: And apparently the claimed savings to the consumer are partly based on the reduced cost of renewables which the federal government wants no part of! It’s like not having their cake but eating it too. Interested parties and opposition leaders have asked to see the modelling, and have received nothing beyond a single spreadsheet.
Jacinta: And since we’ve been talking about the OECD lately, this new NEG’s target for renewables puts us behind the majority of OECD nations. Only five of them – including the USA and Canada – have lower targets than us. And yet the potential for reduced emissions here is greater than just about anywhere else.
Canto: Well it’s no wonder that states such as Victoria and Queensland are unwilling to sign up. They have major renewable energy plans in store, and are challenging what would seem to be a baseless federal assumption, that bringing prices down means excluding renewables. In fact the Feds are quite contradictory and confused on the subject.
Jacinta: Well there’s a good chance the conservatives will get rolled at the next election, so I’m hoping that Federal Labor have all their energy plans ready. And speaking of optimism, here in South Australia we’re apparently still on target to be 100% renewable, energy-wise, by 2025. The AEMO has made this prediction in its Integrated Systems Plan, which is a 20-year blueprint for renewables around the country. There are quite a few projects being developed here in SA, including a 280 MW solar plant in Whyalla, courtesy of British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta…
Canto: Yes, Gupta has argued that the Federal proposal, or promise, to underwrite new power stations, which the conservatives have seized on as a way of advancing the coal agenda, can actually be used to build more solar farms with storage – what he calls ‘firm solar’. I don’t think it’s going to be much of a battle though. There’s no appetite for investing in new coal power stations among the cognoscenti. And another company looking to take advantage of the underwriting mechanism is Genex, which is building solar and hydro projects in Queensland.
Jacinta: Yes, the conservative dinosaurs can bellow all they like, and they may even have some popular appeal, but the smart developers and investors are the ones who’ll carry the day, and they won’t be investing in coal. Anyway, Gupta has very ambitious, transformative plans for Australia’s energy system, which he sees – irony of ironies – as being green-lighted by the Federal underwriting proposal, which is neutral as to the source of the energy used. I don’t know how all this works out financially, but obviously Gupta does, and he’s suggesting we could become a truly cheap energy producer, particularly in solar. He envisions 10GW of solar capacity across the country. He’s also keen to build electric vehicles in Australia, which we may have mentioned before, though maybe not in South Australia, which was the original idea.
Canto: And he’s also planning a storage battery near Port Augusta, due to commence later this year, which will out-biggen the recent Tesla battery. And speaking of the Tesla battery, which has been in operation for around nine months now, it might be worth having a look at how successful, or not, it has been.
Jacinta: Well, I’ve found an analysis of its first four months of operation here, on a blog called Energy Synapse, though it’s a bit difficult to follow. It points out that the battery has two essential purposes; first, to provide stability to the grid, and second, to ‘trade in and arbitrage the energy market’. Energy Synapse was only looking at its success in trading. I would’ve thought its first role was more important, but I suppose that’s because I’m not much of a trader.
Canto: What does arbitrage mean?
Jacinta: Well, it’s about trading in a commodity with a fluctuating price. The key for making a quid, of course, is to buy low and sell high. In the battery’s case, you have to buy energy to recharge it, and you sell it to the grid when need arises. That may not be something under your control, so I’m not sure how you can successfully arbitrage in such a situation. From what I can work out, during the period December to March, the battery was getting plenty of use. December can largely be ruled out as a testing period, but January – a high volatility period – and February were pretty successful, March less so. Estimated net revenue for the 4-month period was $1.4 million, which sounds pretty good to me. But presumably the summer months are better for the battery as that’s when the grid is under greatest pressure? It would be great to have a measure of its performance over the winter. In fact, a full 12 month review would probably be necessary, if not sufficient, for testing how well it trades. But the battery’s efficiency, its rapid response time and proven capability in smoothing out the effects of outages elsewhere, has captured the attention of the public and of other investors. People and companies much smarter and more onto this ball than I am, are getting into big batteries – not just Gupta’s Simec Zen Energy, but CWP Renewables in Victoria, and individuals throughout the country who are installing home battery storage to combine with solar.
Canto: And very recently the federal government has been under attack from its ultra-conservative wing for providing any comfort at all to the clean energy sector, and it’s even possible that the Prime Minister will lose his job over it. It’s bemusing to me that a party which always claims to be the pro-business party is at odds with the business community over this, with Abbott arguing for a hostile takeover of AGL’s Liddell coal-fired power station – a kind of nationalisation… It seems Abbott wants the whole nation to be operated on what he calls ‘reliable baseload power’, essentially from coal.
Jacinta: Well, NSW seems to be going through the horrors at present regarding reliable energy. Its a state heavily reliant on black coal, and it’s been suffering power shortages recently because power stations are undergoing maintenance or units are non-operational. It seems the dependence of industry on a few key providers is causing problems, and dispatchable supply from solar and wind is variable. It seems that leadership in co-ordinating the state energy system is lacking. And of course, that’s where Abbott is coming from. So maybe he’s half-right, he’s just hampered by his pro-coal, anti-renewables tunnel vision.
Canto: Meanwhile the NEG is being roundly criticised, indeed summarily dismissed, by all and sundry, and all we can really be sure of is that leadership in the field of energy will come from particular state governments and private corporations for the foreseeable future.
References
https://energysynapse.com.au/south-australia-tesla-battery-energy-market/
https://theconversation.com/a-month-in-teslas-sa-battery-is-surpassing-expectations-89770
https://reneweconomy.com.au/full-absurdity-of-national-energy-guarantee-laid-bare-75082/
electric vehicles in Australia, a sad indictment
Toyota Prius
I must say, as a lay person with very little previous understanding of how batteries, photovoltaics or even electricity works, I’m finding the ‘Fully Charged’ and other online videos quite addictive, if incomprehensible in parts, though one thing that’s easy enough to comprehend is that transitional, disruptive technologies that dispense with fossil fuels are being taken up worldwide at an accelerating rate, and that Australia is falling way behind in this, especially at a governmental level, with South Australia being something of an exception. Of course the variation everywhere is enormous – for example, currently, 42% of all new cars sold today in Norway are fully electric – not just hybrids. This compares to about 2% in Britain, according to Fully Charged, and I’d suspect that the percentage is even lower in Oz.
There’s so much to find out about and write about in this field it’s hard to know where to start, so I’m going to limit myself in this post to electric cars and the situation in Australia.
First, as very much a lower middle class individual I want to know about cost, both upfront and ongoing. Now as you may be aware, Australia has basically given up on making its own cars, but we do have some imports worth considering, though we don’t get subsidies for buying them as they do in many other countries, nor do we have that much in the way of supportive infrastructure. Cars range in price from the Tesla Model X SUV, starting from $165,000 (forget it, I hate SUVs anyway), down to the Toyota Prius C and the Honda Jazz, both hybrids, starting at around $23,000. There’s also a ludicrously expensive BMW plug-in hybrid available, as well as the Nissan Leaf, the biggest selling electric car worldwide by a massive margin according to Fully Charged, but probably permanently outside of my price range at $51,000 or so.
I could only afford a bottom of the range hybrid vehicle, so how do hybrids work, and can you run your hybrid mostly on electricity? It seems that for this I would want a (more expensive) plug-in hybrid, as this passage from the Union of Concerned Scientists (USA) points out:
The most advanced hybrids have larger batteries and can recharge their batteries from an outlet, allowing them to drive extended distances on electricity before switching to [petrol] or diesel. Known as “plug-in hybrids,” these cars can offer much-improved environmental performance and increased fuel savings by substituting grid electricity for [petrol].
I could go on about the plug-ins but there’s not much point because there aren’t any available here within my price range. Really, only the Prius, the Honda Jazz and a Toyota Camry Hybrid (just discovered) are possibilities for me. Looking at reviews of the Prius, I find a number of people think it’s ugly but I don’t see it, and I’ve always considered myself a person of taste and discernment, like everyone else. They do tend to agree that it’s very fuel efficient, though lacking in oomph. Fuck oomph, I say. I’m the sort who drives cars reluctantly, and prefers a nice gentle cycle around the suburbs. Extremely fuel efficient, breezy and cheap. I’m indifferent to racing cars and all that shite.
Nissan Leaf
I note that the Prius has regenerative braking – what the Fully Charged folks call ‘regen’. In fact this is a feature of all EVs and hybrids. I have no idea wtf it is, so I’ll explore it here. The Union of Concerned Scientists again:
Regenerative braking converts some of the energy lost during braking into usable electricity, stored in the batteries.
“Regenerative braking” is another fuel-saving feature. Conventional cars rely entirely on friction brakes to slow down, dissipating the vehicle’s kinetic energy as heat. Regenerative braking allows some of that energy to be captured, turned into electricity, and stored in the batteries. This stored electricity can later be used to run the motor and accelerate the vehicle.
Of course, this doesn’t tell us how the energy is captured and stored, but more of that later. Regenerative braking doesn’t bring the car to a stop by itself, or lock the wheels, so it must be used in conjunction with frictional braking. This requires drivers to be aware of both braking systems and how they’re combined – sometimes problematic in certain scenarios.
The V useful site How Stuff Works has a full-on post on regen, which I’ll inadequately summarise here. Regen (in cars) is actually celebrating its fiftieth birthday this year, having been first introduced in the Amitron, a car produced by American Motors in 1967. It never went into full-scale production. In conventional braking, the brake pads apply pressure to the brake rotors to the slow the vehicle down. That expends a lot of energy (imagine a large vehicle moving at high speed), not only between the pads and the rotor, but between the wheels and the road. However, regen is a different system altogether. When you hit the brake pedal of an EV (with hand or foot), this system puts the electric motor into reverse, slowing the wheels. By running backwards the motor acts somehow as a generator of electricity, which is then fed into the EV batteries. Here’s how HSW puts it:
One of the more interesting properties of an electric motor is that, when it’s run in one direction, it converts electrical energy into mechanical energy that can be used to perform work (such as turning the wheels of a car), but when the motor is run in the opposite direction, a properly designed motor becomes an electric generator, converting mechanical energy into electrical energy.
I still don’t get it. Anyway, apparently this type of braking system works best in city conditions where you’re stopping and going all the time. The whole system requires complex electronic circuitry which decides when to switch to reverse, and which of the two braking systems to use at any particular time. The best system does this automatically. In a review of a Smart Electric Drive car (I don’t know what that means – is ‘Smart’ a brand name? – is an electric drive different from an electric car??) on Fully Charged, the test driver described its radar-based regen, which connects with the GPS to anticipate, say, a long downhill part of the journey, and in consequence to adjust the regen for maximum efficiency. Ultimately, all this will be handled effectively in fully autonomous vehicles. Can’t wait to borrow one!
Smart Electric Drive, a cute two-seater
I’m still learning all this geeky stuff – never thought I’d be spending an arvo watching cars being test driven and reviewed. But these are EVs – don’t I sound the expert – and so the new technologies and their implications for the environment and our future make them much more interesting than the noise and gas-guzzling stink and the macho idiocy I’ve always associated with the infernal combustion engine.
What I have learned, apart from the importance of battery size (in kwh), people’s obsession with range and charge speed, and a little about charging devices, is that there’s real movement in Europe and Britain towards EVs, not to mention storage technology and microgrids and other clean energy developments, which makes me all the more frustrated to live in a country, so naturally endowed to take advantage of clean energy, whose federal government is asleep at the wheel on these matters, when it’s not being defensively scornful about all things renewable. Hopefully I’ll be able to report on positive local initiatives in this area in future, in spite of government inertia.
our planet home – arctic sea ice is diminishing
Records of Arctic sea ice have been regularly kept since 1980 or so, and there’s been some satellite mapping since the late seventies. The sea ice starts its growth in autumn, reaching its greatest extent at the end of the northern winter. This year has been unusual – after a more rapid freeze-up than usual in September, the growth of ice has slowed substantially, and by the end of October the sea ice extent had reached a new record low for this thirty-five year period. Two principal causes of this slow growth were the high surface temperatures in open waters of the arctic region, as well as high air temperatures. The USA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) provides lots of useful information on the issue and does its best to explain the complex local and general factors driving arctic ice formation and melting.
Arctic sea ice is ice that forms and deforms in the ocean rather than on land, so it doesn’t include icebergs or glaciers. It’s covered in snow most of the year, and its bright surface reflects 80% of sunlight back into space, whereas melted ocean water absorbs 90% of sunlight, causing a positive feedback loop, an acceleration of global warming effects. The term used to describe the whiteness or reflectivity of a surface is albedo. For our planet, albedo is affected primarily by ice and cloud cover.
While it may be that we’ll record the lowest ice maximum ‘on record’ by the end of this winter, we should recall that thirty-odd years isn’t much of a period in geological terms. Nor does melting sea ice substantially affect sea level rise, unlike melting ice sheets and glaciers. The main concern is this change in albedo, and its effect on ocean temperatures, which will not only effect ocean life in the region but also the melting of frozen coastal regions, and weather conditions, in largely unforeseeable ways.
Another issue is that ‘old sea ice’, the type that survives the annual freeze and melt cycle, has reduced substantially since records have been kept. This old ice stretched over a distance of 1.9 million square kilometres back in 1984, but this year that has reduced to about 110,000 square kilometres, according to a report from episode 592 of the SGU. This is a measure of sea ice extent, rather than volume, which would be much more difficult to measure. In any case, it’s a massive reduction in just a generation or so, but again we don’t have long-term data to tell us whether or not the planet has experienced these sorts of rapid changes before. It’s reasonable to suspect not, and that the great volumes of greenhouse gases we’ve been emitting into our atmosphere are having unprecedented effects, but we can’t be sure. In any case, our activities are certainly affecting our planet home, and theatening island and coastal populations around the globe. As mentioned, the warming of the oceans, and of the atmosphere above them, affects the polar jet stream and can have knock-on effects world-wide. The rise in sea level is generally the effect most human populations are concerned with, though the most wealthy residents of low-lying areas seem breezily unconcerned, as this podcast episode from climate one, discussing the response of residents in the San Francisco Bay area, clearly shows.
Arguably though, it’s not so much complacency as bewilderment that’s hampering responses. Projections of sea-level rise are notoriously varied, in keeping with the enormous complexity of the interacting effects of warming. We’re on much safer ground when making observations of past effects than when predicting future ones, and even then it’s tricky, because we don’t have direct measurements beyond a fairly recent time period. It’s generally agreed that the oceans have risen by about 15-20 cm in the last century, but predictions of the rise over the next thirty-odd years to mid-century vary wildly, with climate scientists bickering over the damage such varied estimates is wreaking on their profession.
So what is to be done? Allowing our bewilderment to inhibit all action is obviously counter-productive. We should continue to monitor, model and project, and to speed up the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, with smart solutions to our energy needs as well as ways of minimising those needs, while considering matters of equity and opportunity re developing and developed regions. And we should continue to pressure and push our politicians towards promoting these reductions and solutions.
The over-population clock
a pro-democracy demo in Egypt, 2011
Canto: From time to time I’ve shown my students the world population clock (WPC), because I’ve brought my discourse round to it for some reason, and they’ve been mostly fascinated. And I’ve usually told them that the world’s population will level out at about 9.5 billion by mid-century, because I’ve read or heard that somewhere, or in a few places, but is that really true?
Jacinta: So you’re wanting to investigate some modelling?
Canto: Well yes maybe. I was looking at the WPC the other day, and was shocked at how births are outnumbering deaths currently. What’s actually being done to stem this tide?
Jacinta: Looking at the WPC website, there’s a lot more data there that might enlighten you and calm your fears a bit – if it can be trusted. Ok we went past 7.4 billion this year and you can see that so far there’s 70 milliom births compared to around 29 million deaths, and that looks worrying, but you need to look at long-term trends. The fact is that we’ve added a little over 40 million so far this year, with a current growth rate of about 1.13%. That figure means little by itself, but it’s important to note that it’s less than half of what the growth rate was at its peak, at 2.19% in 1963. The rate has been decelerating ever since. Of course the worry is that this deceleration may slow or stop, but there’s not much sign of that if we look at more recent trends.
Canto: Okay I’m looking at the figures now, and at current trends the projection is 10 billion by 2056, by which time the growth rate is projected to be less than 0.5%, but still a fair way from ZPG. The population, by the way, was two point something billion when I was born. That’s a mind-boggling change.
Jacinta: And yet, leaving aside the damage we’ve done and are doing to other species, we’re doing all right for ourselves, with humanity’s average calorie intake actually increasing over that time, if that indicates anything.
Canto: Averages can carpet over a multitude of sins.
Jacinta: Very quotable. But the most interesting factoid I’ve found here is that the current growth rate of 1.13% is well down on last year’s 1.18%, and the biggest drop in one year ever recorded. In 2010 the growth rate was 2.23%, so the deceleration is accelerating, so to speak. It’s also interesting that this deceleration correlates with increasing urbanisation. We’re now at 54.3% and rising. I know correlation isn’t causation, but it stands to reason that with movement to the city, with higher overheads in terms of housing, and with space being at a premium, but greater individual opportunities, smaller families are a better bet.
Canto: You bet, cities are homogenously heterogenous, all tending to favour smaller but more diverse families it seems to me. That’s why I’m not so concerned about the Brexit phenomenon, from a long-term perspective, though we shouldn’t be complacent about it. We need to maintain opportunities for trade and exchange, co-operative innovation, so that cities don’t evolve into pockets of isolation. Ghettoisation. Younger people get that, but the worry is that they won’t stay young, they won’t maintain that openness to a broader experience.
Jacinta: Well the whole EU thing is another can of worms, and I wonder why it is that so many Brits were so pissed off with it, or were they duped by populist nationalists, or are they genuinely suffering under European tyranny, I’m too far removed to judge.
Canto: Well, if there were too many alienating regulations, as some were suggesting, this should have and surely could have been subject to negotiation. Maybe it’s a lesson for the EU, but you’re right, we’re too far removed to sensibly comment. Just looking at the WPC now – and it’s changing all the time – it has daily birth/death rates which shows that the birth rate today far exceeds the death rate – by more than two to one. How can you possibly extrapolate that to a growth rate of only 1.13%?
Jacinta: Ah well that’s a mathematical question, and I’m no mathematician but obviously if you have a birth rate the same as the death rate you’ll have ZPG, no matter what the current population, where as if you have a disparity between births and deaths, the percentage of population increase (or decrease) will depend on the starting population and the end-population, as a factor of time – whether you measure is annually or daily or whatever.
Canto: Right so let’s practice our mathematics with a simple example and then work out a formula. Say you start with 10, that’s your start population at the beginning of the day. And 24 hours later you end up with 20. That’s a 100% growth rate? But of course that could be with 1000 additional births over the day, and 990 deaths. Or 10 more births and no deaths.
Jacinta: Right, which indicates that the total number of births and deaths is irrelevant, it’s the difference between them that counts, so to speak. So let’s call this difference d, which could be positive or negative.
Canto: But to determine whether this value is positive or negative, or what the figure is, you need to know the value of births (B) and deaths (D).
Jacinta: Right, so d = B – D. And let’s set aside for now whether it’s per diem or per annum or whatever. What we’re wanting to find out is the rate of increase, which we’ll call r. If you have a start population (S) of 10 and d is 10, then the end population (E) will be 20, giving a birth rate r of 100%, which is a doubling. I think that’s right.
Canto: So the formula will be: r = S – E… Fuck it, I don’t get formulae very well, let’s work from actual figures to get the formula. It’s actually useful that we’re almost exactly mid-year, and the figure for d (population growth) is currently a little under 42 million. That’s for a half-year, so I’ll project out to 83 million for 2016.
Jacinta: So d now means annual population growth.
Canto: right. Now if we remove this year’s growth figure from the current overall population we get as our figure for S = 7,391,500,000 and that’s an approximation, not too far off. And we can calculate E as 7,474,500, approximately.
Jacinta: But I don’t think we need to know E, we just need S and d in order to calculate r. r is given as a percentage, but as a fraction it must be d/S. And this can be worked out with any handy calculator. My calculation comes out at 6.6% growth rate.
Canto: Wrong.
Jacinta: Yes, wrong, ok, a quick confab with Dr Google provides this formula. d = ((E – S)/S).100. But we already have that? E-S is 83 million. Divided by S (7,391,500,000), and then multiplying by 100 gives a growth rate annually of 1.1229%, or 1.12% to two decimal places, which is not far off, but significantly less than, the WPC figure of 1.3%. I must have stuffed up the earlier calculation, because I think I used the same basic formula.
Canto: Excellent, so you’re right, my fears are allayed somewhat. Recent figures seem to be showing the growth rate declining faster than expected, but let’s have another look at the end of the year. Could it be that the growth figures are higher in the second half of the year, and the pundits are aware of this and make allowances for it, or are we actually ahead of the game?
Jacinta: We’ll have a look at it again at the end of the year. Remember we did a bit of rounding, but I doubt that it would’ve made that much difference.
Some current national annual population growth rates (approx):
Afghanistan 3.02%
Australia 1.57%
Bangladesh 1.20%
Brazil 0.91%
Canada 1.04%
China 0.52%
India 1.26%
Iran 1.27%
Germany 0.06%
Morocco 1.37%
Nigeria 2.67%
Pakistan 2.11%
South Africa 1.08%
United Kingdom 0.63%
(These are not, of course, calculated solely by births minus deaths, as migration plays a substantial role – certainly in Australia. Some surprises here. The highest growth rate on the full list of countries: Oman, 8.45%. The lowest is Andorra with -3.61%, though Syria, with -2.27% on these figures, has probably surged ahead by now).
oil, black gold, texas tea: riding the long decline
the volatile oil price, based on Brent Crude
Canto: The price of oil, if you’re looking at Brent Crude, is just over $35 per barrel. That’s today, February 4 2016. But what’s Brent Crude, and whose dollars are we talking about, and who if anyone controls the oil price?
Jacinta: Don’t look at me. So we’re going to talk OPEC and Saudi Arabia, and gluts and reserves and peak supply and peak demand and carbon emissions and oil geopolitics now are we?
Canto: Why not? The oil price has just picked up slightly from a 12-year low of just under $30 a barrel, and nobody seems to know what’s causing the volatility, because there are so many players and factors affecting the global market. The uncertainty is as much long-term as short-term. It’s probably fair to say that the glory days of oil, that ineluctably diverse commodity, are behind us, but the decline will be slow, and we’re still a long way from finding a viable alternative in the transport sector.
Jacinta: Well, especially in air transport. So it’s hard to know where to start, but what’s OPEC?
Canto: Well you probably know that it’s an organisation of the major petroleum exporting countries, an organisation with a slightly shifting membership but always centred around the principal exporter, Saudi Arabia. It was founded in 1960, at a time when it was becoming clear that oil was the world’s most bankable commodity, and that most of that commodity was to be found in the Middle East – in Saudi in particular.
Jacinta: Right, and of course OPEC was formed to protect the interests of suppliers, and to ensure sovereignty over supply, against a background of exploitation and corruption. Not that the new ‘owners’ of the oil are any less corrupt than the previous ones.
Canto: I don’t know how useful it is for us to go into all this, I mean surely we don’t want to get caught up in the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East and its antagonists…
Jacinta: No no you’re right, though I do find it all very intriguing. I mean, this oil dependence we have is a recent phenomenon, essentially a 20th century issue, and it has had extraordinary consequences. To take just one example, it is the absolute basis of the wahabist Saud dynasty’s stranglehold on power, and I think it’s fair to say that this hasn’t been a good thing – particularly for the women of the region. I know I’m not alone in finding it demoralising that the rise to riches of Saudi Arabia in recent decades has seen no increase in freedom or in education outside of some narrow technical areas.
Canto: Yes, it’s depressing, so shall we instead focus on the commodity itself, and its future?
what this graph doesn’t tell you is most of this new oil is costly, dirty, hard-to-extract oil, from fracking, tar sands, ocean drilling etc
Jacinta: Fine well its immediate future was secured in the past with the invention of the automobile and the aeroplane. Before that the stuff was mostly used for kerosine, for heating.
Canto: And don’t forget plastics.
Jacinta: Absolutely but as I’ve said, it’s the transport sector that’s most dependent on oil, so how do we solve that problem, assuming we want to wean ourselves from the stuff?
Canto: But are there really any serious alternatives? I mean you mentioned air travel. We’ve heard of electric cars, solar cars, hydrogen cars, but air travel? Remember the Hindenburg?
Jacinta: Well I heard one expert put it this way. The world is largely tooled for liquid fuel – that’s petrol, LPG, diesel etc. That’s an investment of multi-trillions of dollars, an investment that continues every day. And there’s no viable alternative ready to go now or in the foreseeable, and even if there was, trashing all this perfectly functional machinery and all the ancillary technology and business that connects to the oil and gas industry – the consequences need to be realistically considered. You can’t be too simplistic about this stuff. So it is going to be incremental change no matter what.
Canto: So you mean a continual tinkering with current fuels to minimise their environmental impact while experimenting with new forms of fuel which we might be able to exploit without too much retooling.
Jacinta: Yes, at least not in the short term.
Canto: So how does LPG compare with petrol in terms of viability and environmental impact? I know there are those in the oil and gas industries who point to gas as a ‘green’ alternative, while others like Naomi Klein dismiss it as just another fossil fuel. Is it plausible or sensible to aim for LPG as the predominant road fuel while developing renewable alternatives?
Jacinta: Well there seems to be quite a few problems with LPG technology in cars – lots of extra plumbing and wiring, things to go wrong, high costs to fix problems, no doubt largely due to it being a minority system. And that’s the main problem – LPG has been around for a long time now but has never really taken off and been seriously competitive with petrol. That means availability is limited – a major inconvenience – and maintenance costs will be higher. That doesn’t look like changing.
Canto: How about biofuels? They were all the rage a while back but they seem to have gone out of fashion. Something about wasting good food, or grain or whatever, and the precious land to grow it on, on something so trivial as travel.
Jacinta: Well yes, there are those problems but there’s a new, or newish idea being worked on re biofuels – the use of algae. But I plan to write about that, and other possible solutions, on our other blog, Solutions OK.
Canto: Yes, and that’s also the place to consider the future of autonomous vehicles, and even autonomous electric vehicles, because it’s quite likely, isn’t it, that if these vehicles eventually take off (and I don’t mean flying vehicles, though they’ve also been developed), they could revolutionise our road usage, and why wouldn’t we use a better source of energy, such as electricity – already a proven technology for road transport, pre-dating the infernal combustion engine, or at least its use in motor vehicles.
the future – vehicles so autonomous they refuse to have passengers
Jacinta: Yes, so talk about future energy solutions is verboten here, and talk about geopolitics is obviously beneath us, so what’s left?
Canto: We’ll think of something, next time.
does this change everything? Paris, Naomi Klein, extractivism and blockadia
Canto: Well I’ve just managed to finish reading Naomi Klein’s great big book about the politics of climate change, This changes everything, and since this more or less coincides with the recent political decisions made about tackling climate in Paris, I thought we might spend this session, or even a few sessions, on the future of clean energy, the fossil fuel industry and so forth.
Jacinta: Ah yes, the Paris conference, can you fill me in on that? All I know is that the outcome is being touted as a turning point, a watershed moment, but I presume none of it is enforceable, and I can’t really see the fossil fuel giants giving up the ghost, or considering anything much beyond business as usual…
Canto: Okay, the UN climate change conference in Paris ended on December 12 2015, having run for about 3 weeks. The principal outcome has been the Paris agreement, which was a more substantive agreement on emissions reduction than has been achieved in the past. It apparently represents a consensus drawn from some 196 national representatives.
Jacinta: And I seem to recall the figure of 2% being bandied about. What was that about?
Canto: Ummm, I think you might be referring to the plan, or hope, to limit global warming to 2 degrees, through zero net greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of the 21st century, globally.
Jacinta: Wow, that’s some hope.
Canto: Well the hope is to keep the warming to well under 2 degrees C, preferably aiming for 1.5, which would entail substantial reductions well before 2050, but of course this is all promises, promises.
Jacinta: So what about enforcement, and how is this going to be achieved nation by nation, considering that some nations are huge emitters, and some nations, like India, are still developing and industrialising?
Canto: Right so there are all these semi-commitments and promises, but crunch time starts in April 2016, from which time the relevant parties are asked to sign up to the agreement – that’s 197 parties in all, including all member nations of the UN, the European Union and some not-quite-nations like Palestine and the Cook Islands. They have a year to sign up, and the agreement will only come into force if 55 countries that produce 55% of global greenhouse emissions sign up.
Jacinta: Wait, does that mean all of the top 55 greenhouse gas emitters, or any 55 that together emit 55% of the greenhouse gases emitted by humans?
Canto: Uhhh, I’m not sure but I think it’s the latter.
Jacinta: Great, so Australia doesn’t have to sign. Quel soulagement!
Canto: Funny that, because the Wikipedia article on the Paris agreement, specifically mentions the climate change ‘skepticism’ of our conservative government…
Jacinta: Wow, what an honour.
Canto: Time to lobby our environment minister. Of course there are a lot of people protesting that this agreement doesn’t go far enough – not so much in the targets as in the voluntary nature of it all. I mean, it may not even come into voluntary force if nations don’t sign up to it, and of course there’s no enforcement mechanism. Here’s how Wikipedia describes the situation:
The Agreement will not become binding on its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55% of the world’s greenhouse gas have ratified the Agreement. There is doubt whether some countries will agree to do so. Each country that ratifies the agreement will be required to set a target for emission reduction, but the amount will be voluntary. There will be [no] mechanism to force a country to set a target by a specific date and no enforcement if a set target is not met. There will be only a “name and shame” system or as Janos Pasztor, the U.N. assistant secretary-general on climate change, told CBS News (US), a “name and encourage” plan.
Jacinta: Well I think it’s definitely a positive development, which will add pressure to the fossil fuel industries and their supporters. I notice that one of our green pollies was castigating the government the other day about the expansion of the Abbott Point coal terminal, citing the Paris agreement. That’s going to be a much repeated dagger-thrust into the future. So how does this all connect with Naomi Klein’s book?
Canto: Well I think you’re right to accentuate the positives. I mean, how can you seriously police or enforce such an agreement without interfering with the ‘national sovereignty’ that so many nations bellow about – especially when there’s a hint of criticism from the UN? So the first real positive coming from this confab is that all the parties are in agreement about the imminent threat of AGW, and they’ve actually managed to come to a broad agreement over a target and a goal. That’s a big deal. The second positive is, as you say, the impact of that consensus on the battle against the cashed-up fossil fuel industries, and the mostly conservative governments around the world that are still into science denialism, including our own government. As to This changes everything, Klein sees the AGW issue as a possible game-changer for the politics of global capitalism and free marketeering, which is rather ambitious, but she puts her faith in the protest movements, the indigenous rights movements and other grassroots movements who are, as she sees it, rising up more than ever before to create headaches for the business-as-usual model. She calls this grassroots approach ‘blockadia’, probably not an original coinage.
Jacinta: So she sees it as an issue to fight global capitalism, to replace it with… what? Surely the renewable energy industries are capitalist industries too?
Cant: Well yes, I think there’s a certain amount of idealism in her view, an old-fashioned back-to-nature ethic, and I don’t think she emphasises the solutions and the science as much as she emphasises the problems and the politics, but if you take the view that the fossil fuel industries need to be phased out, sooner rather than later, you’ll perhaps be as much inspired by the heroic and hard-working efforts to prevent mining and drilling – which, let’s face it, have caused huge devastation in many areas – as you will by the innovations and improvements in clean energy. Which brings me to the other term used a lot in Klein’s book – extractivism.
Jacinta: Which presumably stands not just for the fossil fuel industry but the whole mentality of ‘what can we extract from this entity?’, be it animal vegetable or mineral.
Canto: The ancient Greeks did it with their slaves, the British did it with their colonies…
Jacinta: And their slaves..
Canto: The tobacco industry are doing it with the resource of willing smokers in non-western countries, poachers are doing it with elephants in Africa, the porn industry is doing it with pretty and mostly impoverished girls in the US and Europe, multinational companies are doing it with cheap labour worldwide. Extractivism has always been with us…
Jacinta: Point taken but I think we’re getting a bit carried away here. I presume Klein was using the term in a more limited sense, though perhaps with a nod to broader extractivist tendencies. And I have to say, quite apart from the devastation caused by tailings and disasters like Deepwater Horizon, I’ve always felt there’s something not quite right about our recent cavalier exploitation of a process of incredibly slow transformation of once-living and evolving entities – our ancestors in a sense – into coal and oil. Doesn’t it seem somehow sacrilegious?
Canto: Well perhaps, but I’m not sure if ‘exploitation’ is the right word. People get exploited. Okay animals can get exploited. But dead matter turning into coal? All species do what they can to survive and thrive, and they don’t worry about the cost to others or to historical processes. Right now parrots are feasting on my neighbour’s fruit trees. They’re extracting what they can in one go, and they’ll be back for more unless someone stops them. My neighbours might consider the parrots a pest, but that’s only because they want to extract as much as they can from those trees, to make jam, or to add fibre and other nutritional elements to their diet. As to the fossil fuels I’m all for keeping them in the ground, but more because of the damage they do to our atmosphere than because it’s ‘nice’ and ‘respectful’ not to extract them.
Jacinta: Spoken like a true instrumental scientist, but I can’t help feeling there’s more to it than you say. But what do you think about the view that this is a game-changer for global politics? Klein subtitles her book ‘capitalism v the climate’, as if one or the other has to come out on top. Do you think that’s really the choice?
Canto: No I don’t, but I doubt that Klein really imagines, or even wants this to spell the end of capitalism. I’m no anti-capitalist of course, but then I see capitalism in much broader terms. Those parrots are capitalising on a resource previously unavailable to them, and they’ll continue to do so unless prevented, by netting or something worse. Fossil fuel companies have learned to capitalise on a resource previously unavailable to them, before we learned how to process and extract energy from such material, and they’ll continue to do so unless they’re prevented, by legislation, by blockadia, or by the availability of more attractive alternatives, such as the more effective exploitation of the sun. Or capitalising on the solar resource.
Jacinta: So you believe that all humans, or rather, all creatures are capitalists? Isn’t that a bit of a narrow view?
the capitalist menace
Canto: Well no, as I say, I think it’s a broad view of the capitalist concept. But of course you might say that this hardly accounts for blockadia. If we’re all capitalists at heart, how do we account for the amount of energy so many citizens put into blocking capitalist exploitation? But that’s easily explained by the parrots and fruit example. The parrots’ gain is the neighbours’ loss. The neighbours have gone to a lot of trouble cultivating the ground, planting the trees, watering and fertilising, and these pesky parrots have come along without so much as a by your leave, and devastated the crop. Similarly farmers who have put a lot of time and energy into cultivating their land, and indigenous people who have learned over generations how to fish and hunt in an area in such a way that stocks can still be replenished rather than devastated, are naturally outraged that these fossil fuel companies have come along and ‘poisoned the well’. The farmers and the indigenes are also capitalists, very effective capitalists for their own needs, but they’re faced with different types of capitalists with different needs. So, to me, it’s a matter of resources, needs, diversity and negotiation.
Jacinta: Hmmm, well I’m inclined to agree with you. Of course indigenous people, such as our Aborigines, like to talk of spiritual connections to the land and its bird and animal life, but I’m not much into spirituality. But I like the idea that even though they’re into hunting and killing those creatures in order to survive, they tell stories about them, and exhibit a great deal of respect and fondness for them. That seems healthy to me.
Canto: I agree completely. I’m not trying to say ‘all is capitalism’. There’s much more to life than that. The beauty of that story-telling and that affection for the land and its inhabitants and their ways is that it’s not a kind of master-race view. The Judeo-Christian view has been that all things, including all creatures, have been put here for our benefit. Of course modern Christianity has largely re-interpreted this as custodianship, which is an improvement, but I prefer the perspective that we’re all in this together, and we should look out for each other. Birds have to eat, and they like to eat fruit, and birds are fantastic creatures. They deserve our consideration.
Jacinta: Well that’s a nice note to end on. And what about the fossil fuel industry?
Canto: I think it’s had its day. It’s time to move beyond it.
a couple of controversial subjects
OUR NUCLEAR FUTURE?
Our state government has, surprisingly, ordered a Royal Commission into nuclear power, which will bring on the usual controversy, but everything I’ve read on the science and energy front suggests that our energy future will rely on a mix of sources, including renewables, clean coal (if that’s not an oxymoron), nuclear energy and perhaps even fusion. Fukushima scared everyone, but it was an old reactor, built in the wrong place, and nuclear technology has advanced considerably since then. I hope to write more on this, probably on my much-neglected solutions ok? blog.
PNG WITCH-HUNTING GOES ON AND ON
VLAD SOKHIN These men call their gang “Dirty Dons 585” and admit to rapes and armed robberies in the Port Moresby area. They say two-thirds of their victims are women. Photo taken from The Global Mail
I was shocked to hear the other day about people (mostly women, but also children) being accused of witchcraft/sorcery in PNG, right on our doorstep, over the past couple of years, and hunted down and brutally slaughtered, often in bizarrely sexualised ways. Somehow this story has passed me by until now. The country, or part of it, seems to have been gripped by a witch craze, like those that broke out in Europe from time to time, especially in the seventeenth century, not really so long ago. And they fizzled out as mysteriously as they burst into being. In fact the USA’s Committee for Skeptical Inquiry was reporting on these horrors from back in 2008, with some 50 victims claimed for that year. The article ended on an optimistic note:
Papua New Guinea is in dire need of skepticism, education, and legal reform. It appears that the latter is finally happening. These latest horrific killings, and no doubt the ensuing media outrage, have prompted the country’s Constitutional Review and Law Reform Commission to create new laws to prevent (or at least reduce) witchcraft-related deaths.
However, this 2013 article, from the sadly no longer extant Global Mail, indicates that the problem is far more deeply-rooted and long-standing than first thought, and it’s mutating and shifting to different regions of the country. Brutality is on the increase, fuelled by drugs and alcohol, but above all by massive social dysfunction, with children being regularly indoctrinated in methods of public torture. Sanguma, or sorcerers, are usually blamed for any deaths, and gangs of unemployed men (and almost all the men of the region are unemployed) go hunting for them amongst the most marginalised and unprotected women in the community. The article makes for harrowing reading, going into some detail on the suffering of these women, and highlighting the intractability of the problem. There are heroes too, including Catholic priests and nuns working at the coal-face. Unfortunately, tossing around terms like skepticism, education and legal reform won’t cut it here. This is a problem of deep social malaise, suspicion, superstition, poverty and despair that will take generations to resolve, it seems.