Category Archives: People/Equity

Generate Electricity for creating Well Being

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Yes, CO2 may be bad but that is if you have first reached the level of usage in Australia, Kuwait or Norway. However, if you are a poor person in developing countries like India, China and Brazil, you still need a electricity to create well being even if it emits CO2 and consumption of 2,500 kw seems to be the magic number.

I think the focus to reduce CO2 to control the climate (and this is being questioned now by the solar cycle theory) we should not forget the current human beings who need electricity to survive and live a good life.

From HBR:

The greater a country’s electricity consumption, the greater the well-being of its people. Electricity doesn’t cause well- being, of course. But it is a powerful enabler. When people have lights that allow them to study and work after dark, refrigeration to keep foods and medicine fresh, pumps and purifiers to irrigate farmland and produce safe drinking water, and cell phones and computers to connect them with commercial, educational, and health care resources, they can more fully participate in the social and economic activities that drive human development.
A little electricity goes a long way. Note that when annual consumption rises from 0 to just a few thousand kilowatt hours per capita, countries move near the top of the HDI scale. Argentina, with per capita consumption of about 2,500 kWh, has an HDI score approaching that of Canada, whose consumption is seven times higher.

Economists Ponder Human Adaptation to Climate Change

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As scientists struggle to predict exactly how global climate change will affect our environment, economists are grappling with another question: How well can humans adapt?

Judging from the history of wheat production in North America, the answer is very well, says Paul Rhode of the University of Michigan. In a paper done together with Alan Olmstead of the University of California-Davis, which he presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Mr. Rhode looks at how wheat production fared between the mid-1800s and the late 1900s, as production moved into parts of North America with harsher climates. The conclusion: Production adapted successfully as farmers introduced new strains that grew well in the new climates.

“We’ve been there and done that in terms of adjusting wheat production to new climates,” he said.

via Economists Ponder Human Adaptation to Climate Change – Real Time Economics – WSJ.

This is one example of wheat production in North America but what is relevant is that adaptation is possible and may be more important to concentrate than anything else for the next century.

It’s the poor who will pay for Copenhagen’s circus

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Not that it should be a surprise. By comparison to the 21,000 Copenhagen observers,last week’s comparable World Trade Organisation Ministerial Conference in Geneva only attracted 500 observers who were broadly committed to securing an inter-national trade deal to promote poverty-alleviating free trade.

The irony is that if there were as many people who cared about cutting poverty, the world’s poor would be better able to adapt to the consequences of climate change and there’d also be the economic resources to cut emissions and deliver a binding agreement at Copenhagen.

via It’s the poor who will pay for Copenhagen’s circus | The Australian.

Lorn Turnbull from the UK Praliament on Climate Change

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From Wattsupwiththat:

My Lords, on first reading the Committee on Climate Change’s latest progress report, I found it an impressive document. It was broad in scope and very detailed. But the more I dug into it the more troubled I became. Below the surface there are serious questions about the foundations on which it has been constructed. There are questions in four areas-the framework created by the Climate Change Act 2008, the policy responses at EU and UK level, the estimate of costs and finally the scientific basis on which the whole scheme of things rests. I will consider each in turn.

Unlike many of those involved in the climate change field, I have no pecuniary interest to declare, but I am a founder trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which seeks to bring rationality, objectivity and, above all, tolerance to the debate.

I have long been in the camp of what might be called the semi-sceptics. I have taken the science on trust, while becoming increasingly critical of the policy responses being made to achieve a given CO2 or global warming constraint. First, let us look at the Climate Change Act, which has been highly praised, even today, as the most comprehensive and ambitious framework anywhere in the world-a real pioneering first for the UK. However, it has serious flaws. It starts by imposing a completely unworkable duty on the Secretary of State to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, even though many of the actions required lie outside his control. It would have been better, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and I argued, for the duty to be connected to what the Secretary of State can control, such as his own actions and policies, and not the outcome, which he cannot.

[...]

Thirdly, there is the issue of cost. All we had to go on at the time when the target was set more ambitiously was the estimate by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, of 1 per cent of GDP. Many people were sceptical at the time and probably even more are now, including, it seems, the noble Lord, Lord Stern, himself. It was reported in the press last week that he now thinks that it might be 2 per cent, but could rise to 5 per cent. I hope he will clarify this when he speaks to us shortly.

In the document that we have before us, the committee says that it previously estimated that costs in 2020 would be about 1 per cent of GDP. That is consistent with its view that it might get to 2 per cent by 2050. In the new report it simply reaffirms the 1 per cent figure in just one paragraph in 250 pages.

[...]

The noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord May, and their eminent colleagues on the CCC have a choice. They can take the policy framework as given, the policy responses as given, the costs as given, and the science as given, and then proceed to churn out more and more sophisticated projections, or-as I hope-they can apply the formidable intellectual firepower they command and start to find answers to many of the unsolved questions.

The Aussie climate change Beaurocracy

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THE Australian delegation to the Copenhagen climate change conference could number 114, official documents reveal.That number dwarfs the 71-strong British delegation. Such is the size of the delegation, it includes a dedicated “baggage liaison officer”.The carbon footprint for 114 people travelling to Copenhagen and back business class amounts to 1817 tonnes of emissions — the equivalent to the annual output of 2500 people in Malawi. The list appears to contradict assurances from Kevin Rudds office last weekend that fewer than 50 federal officials would attend.

via Aussie footprint 1817 tonnes, and counting | The Australian.

What makes a nation rich?

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From MIT economist Daron Acemoglu:

Full Image – Link

And yet while Sachs and Diamond offer good insight into certain aspects of poverty, they share something in common with Montesquieu and others who followed: They ignore incentives. People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.

Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.

How do we know that institutions are so central to the wealth and poverty of nations? Start in Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

And yet they are far from the same.

(from Greg Mankiw)

Australian ETS = Carbon Tax + Consumer Welfare

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I have been rooting for the ETS for a while now but with better understanding of the legislation (thanks a lot to the commentary on BusinessSpectator.com.au) I have learned that the ETS in its current form is not going to solve Australia’s problems at all. With ability to pacify any group that the government seems fit and the issue of carbon offsets there are not guarantees on how on the scheme will work.

The latest comes from Robert Gottliebsen who explains how the money from the ETS will be used as a welfare card by the labour government to stay in power.

Over the period from 2011 to 2020 the government expects to raise a staggering $114 billion from industry based on a carbon price of above $20 a tonne.

Where will that money go? John Howard retained office via the so called ‘Howard battlers’. Rudd learned from Howard so that’s where the money goes.

About $54 billion, or just under half, goes to lower and middle income people. Around 90 per cent of all low income households – or some 2.6 million households – will receive assistance equal to around 120 per cent of the overall cost increases they face.

Around 50 per cent of middle income households – about 1.7 million – will be fully compensated for overall cost increases flowing from the carbon trading legislation. And it gets better. Once the scheme starts, assistance will continue in perpetuity because these assistance payments are indexed to CPI and upfront assistance will automatically increase in line with the increasing carbon price as it affects household cost.

Think about it, if we provide people with 120% of the increase in costs; so more than what the costs have increased; then there is no hope in changing behaviour which is the goal.

Earlier I quoted Greg Mankiw on the fundamental theorem of the ETS:

Cap-and-trade = Carbon tax + Corporate welfare.

Well Greg, we have changed that in Australia. It should now read,


Cap-and-trade = Carbon tax + Consumer welfare + Corporate welfare.

Scientists vs Greenpeace on Salmon, I will go with the the boffins

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It’s generally better for the planet to eat frozen grub that's come a lot of food miles than fresh which has travelled fewer miles by air, in fact. According to the enviro-scientists:

The choice to buy frozen matters more than organic vs conventional or wild vs farmed.

There were other conclusions from the study which could be seen as flying in the face of conventional eco-wisdom. According to the assembled boffins:

Catching salmon in large nets as they school together has one tenth the impact of catching them in small numbers using baited hooks and lures.

This directly contradicts the advice offered by Greenpeace, for instance, which says “choose line-caught fish wherever possible”.

Deep waters, these.

via Eat frozen food and avoid line-caught fish, says eco study • The Register.