2005/03/15: I hate fake conservationists

Conservationists are too nice. They let all sorts of fake conservationists string along under the conservationist banner. This is leaving the voters confused.

Firstly: animal liberation and the protection of specific animals from human action, has nothing to do with conservation which is about the protection of species and ecosystems. Indeed animal protection is often at odds with sensible conservation. We don't cull koalas or fruit bats even when they are destroying endangered plants. We don't cull kangaroos but insist on letting them destroy their habitat and then starve to death. We don't allow kangaroo farming, so farmers are forced to continue with sheep and other things that destroy the Australian environment. We need to meet this sentimentality head on when it conflicts with the desire to manage the environment well. And we particularly need to denounce attempts by animal rights people to claim to be conservationists. The idea that the way to save animals is to not kill them is something that appeals to children and we need to forcefully say that habitat loss is the overwhelming cause of the loss of species, ecosystems and diversity. [Which is not to say that there is anything wrong with people pursuing animal welfare, I'm only complaining about those that claim that this activity is conservation.]

A second group think that conservation means conserving the view. So that people who don't want to see windmills on their bit of coast will try to claim to be conservationist.

The third group is opposed to modern life, and fearful of scientific and technological change. They are easily detected by their claim that primitive people are in tune with nature and never destroy their environment. How wrong they are! The greatest ecological disaster in Australian history was the destruction of the megafauna when Aborigines first arrived. Indeed it is impossible to understand ecological management in Australia unless you realise that we can't get back to the natural environment of 50,000 years ago. It is not the case that we can leave nature alone and it will return to a natural state. Instead without megafauna and Aboriginal burning we get fuel build up followed by ecologically disastrous fires.

A fourth group are anti-conservationists. They think that we should only adopt conservation policies when there is no risk to humans, and damn the environment. In particular they favour continuing to burn coal and build dams rather than moving to nuclear power. The environmental impact of blocking the natural flow of rivers and of pumping CO₂ into the air is horrific. The environmental affect of nuclear power stations is to create a really effective nature reserve around them. An accident has no negative impact on wildlife. Chernobyl has allowed the native flora and fauna of Ukraine to return. Not that we'd embark on nuclear power if we expected accidents. There is every reason to believe that Australia at least would run such stations very well. And we can quite easily site them far from the madding crowd. And we have just as much uranium as coal. This is something we can do for the world.

The Greens are so heavily infiltrated with fake conservationists that I can't imagine them ever having genuinely environmentalist policies.

Climate change: a view from the right

We have to thank the Green Left for energetically bringing the issue of Climate Change to our attention. But now that we are starting to understand the problem we need to develop an Economic Rationalist solution. The views of the Green Left on how to solve the problem are not just wrong, they are dangerously wrong.

The message from the Green Left is that we have to sacrifice and suffer. If we suffer enough from higher energy prices from renewable sources, and from reduced energy consumption then that will solve the problem. Suffering is necessary and sufficient, they say. Does this sound familiar? Sacrifice and suffering is what religious leaders have been prescribing to appease the gods from the beginning of humanity. It taps into an instinct to sacrifice for the good of the community. We are all good at pretending to do it, while hoping that others do more. However it is completely irrelevant to solving Climate Change because it is not necessary, and because the sort of sacrifices being proposed, for example by Al Gore at the end of "An Inconvenient Truth", are nowhere near sufficient.

The first mistake is to see the solution in terms of specific regulations, penalties and subsidies. That always creates lots of busy work for government without making real progress on the issue. What we need to do is impose a cost on activities we want to reduce. I'll call that a tax. We want to give money for activities we want to encourage. I'll call that a negative tax. The Carbon Tax Base (CTB) will be the estimated cheapest marginal cost of removing 1 tonne of carbon from the air. Some fraction of the CTB will be applied to fossil fuels as they come out of the ground, and to imported fossil fuel (unless there is an intergovernmental agreement with the source country). The same fraction of the CTB will be paid, as a negative tax, to activities that permanently remove carbon from the air. Turning grassland into forest might be the cheapest way to do this, but it is a one-off and is not renewable. There may be a renewable solution here if the wood is regularly harvested and treated so that it won't rot. There will be in between cases where there is payment for CO2 taken out of the atmosphere (as wood in this case), and the money is repaid as positive carbon tax as the CO2 is returned (by rotting).

This proposal opens up every option to solve the problem. Energy costs are increased, so people will favour activities which use less. Fossil fuel is made less attractive as an energy source relative to alternatives. And finally people can put their minds to ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and get rewarded by that (and the continuing burners of fossil fuel will have an advantage in doing this, since they will have a more concentrated stream of CO2 to work with).

Initially the tax will bring in more than is paid out to those removing CO2. Indeed the aim will be to take 20 years to reach equality. During this period there will be a surplus, but the aim will be for the carbon tax to be revenue neutral. The excess will be returned to the people in the form of a negative poll tax (in other words equally to everyone). This will be quite close to an equitable way of helping people handle the increased costs. It would be silly to return the money in a way that gave more to those who use more energy since that would just subtract from the effect of the carbon tax.

There is basically just one parameter which needs to be adjusted in the scheme: the product of the CTB and a fraction chosen for policy reasons. This would be set by an independant body, following the very successful model of interest rates. The legislation would set Australia's aim for CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The independant body would aim to hit a net rate of emission/removal which would aim to hit the legislated target in about 50 years if all other countries were cooperating. It would work up to that cruising rate over an initial 20 year period.

Carbon Trading is another market based approach to greenhouse emissions. It is a left wing bureaucrats idea of how to do it. It targets the emissions, which need not be fossil fuel derived. It should target the fossil fuel extraction because that all ends up as CO2 eventually, and it is easy to police. Existing schemes don't seem to distinguish between renewable extraction of CO2 and one-off actions like reafforestation (which then needs to be policed to see that it isn't undone). Still this is an international system and the best way for Australia to use it would be to act as a single entity, with our verified CO2 extraction (paid for as negative tax) attracting carbon trading credits for Australia as a whole. We could then use these to encourage other useful activity world wide. And of course we should push for a more sensible international system, and make reciprocal agreements with other countries that are carbon-taxing fossil fuel mining.

The Green Left would say that the aim of combatting climate change is to return the world and its climate to its natural state. This is a terrible idea. With 6 billion mouths to feed, and counting, we need to manage the climate and keep it at an optimal level. Nature is just as capable as humanity of messing up the climate.

If you look at a graph of the world's temperature over the last 100,000 years or so you'll see this little straight bit in the top right. That's 8000 years of stable warm wet climate. Before that it jiggles around all over the place, and nearly always much colder and much drier than it is now. Very unstable, very cold and very dry is the worlds natural state since the age of the glaciers started half a million years ago. It is more important to avoid a return to those normal conditions than it is to avoid global warming. Of course global warming is much more urgent.

There is a lot of misleading comment around associating "warm" with "dry" climate change. Naturally the warmer the ocean is, and the higher the sea level, the more water evaporates, and the more rain that falls eventually. That's why the world's climate is either cold and dry during ice ages, or it is warm and wet during interglacials like the one we are enjoying. The reason the warm-dry combination gets mentioned is that climate change is not uniform. A British study based on simulations claims global warming will make 2/3 of the world wetter and 1/3 drier. However accurate that is, there are reasonable general arguments as well as simulations to suggest that global warming will make the southern half of Australia drier. Outside Australia the concerns about drier conditions seem to be only based on particular simulations and seem to be taken more seriously than they should.

Another popular misconception is that there was this CO2 in the atmosphere, just sitting there at a particular level, then we added more. In fact CO2 moves into and out of the atmosphere at quite a high rate. So, the fact that the level of CO2 has remained quite stable over long periods means that the rates of.CO2 entering and leaving are the same. But it means more than that. The world settled into a stable equilibrium of atmospheric CO2. If the amount of CO2 increases, say from a volcanic erruption, then the processes taking CO2 out of the atmosphere also increase, and similarly any decrease encouraged the processes that put CO2 back. We can imagine the state of the world as a balling rolling on a plane that isn't flat. It will roll down hill, following the course that water would take. Eventually it comes to rest in a depression. Whichever way it is pushed it wants to roll back to the lowest point of the depression.

Continuing our analogy, suppose we give the ball a push in a direction that we might call "higher CO2". Eventually we might push it over the lip of our local depression and the ball might start rolling again looking for a new depression: a new equilibrium point. However there is no guarantee that it will keep rolling in that direction. It might go around and end up in the other direction from the way it was pushed. In other words, a push in the direction of greater warming might tip us into an ice age, though perhaps not as fast as in "The Day After Tomorrow". I've been assuming that the push back force is well behaved like gravity. It might not be and it might force the ball back towards the low point, but then overshoot. In that way it might find a much lower lip that it can easily get over and then keep heading towards the other stable equilibrium that we know exists that puts the world into an Ice Age.

Suppose we set our CO2 target at 350ppm. Perhaps in 40 years the CO2 level will start to fall rapidly. If we've set up a flexible mechanism then that mechanism will react to support the CO2 level. When the carbon tax goes negative then business might go back to those abandoned gas fields and make money just by venting methane.

This plan doesn't involve government telling everyone what to do, it just readjusts economic incentives in the same way that interest rate adjustments do. This plan doesn't involve handing control back to mother nature, instead it takes a necessary step to control her. This plan doesn't involve any necessary sacrifice, it is designed to come in sufficiently slowly that it can leverage ongoing economic growth. These three things might annoy Bob Brown, but that is just a subsidiary benefit. The main point is that we need to solve Climate Change, and only rational economic policies will do it. If we don't do it then the Left will be pleased to take the reins, causing economic mayhem, and failing to address the problem.

Oh to be Canada: Why do nuclear waste storage

It must be nice to be Canada. They don't have to go along with the United States' military adventures like Vietnam and Iraq, except when right and World opinion are behind them, as in Korea and Afghanistan. Yet they know that the US can never let anything bad happen to Canada. Australia would love to be in that position. Well we can. More details below, but first some introductory facts.

Australia's proximity to the largest Muslim nation makes us nervous. This is undoubtedly irrational, but the feeling is a potent force in Australian politics. The response is to show slavish friendship to the Americans. The electorates support for our involvement in Iraq is typical. The fact that the war is a disaster doesn't matter. In fact in a funny way it helps. Our message to America is that we support you, right or wrong. However our slavishness is going to start to wear thin with the electorate as the government enacts the provisions of the amusingly named "Free Trade Agreement", like the recent Copyright act that will make nearly every Australian a criminal.

As a practical matter it is not clear that all our attempts to ingratiate ourselves with the Americans will be effective. The American electors have still never heard of us, except for those who think we have something to do with "The Sound of Music". Their political system nearly always picks a state Governor with no foreign policy expertise for President. The Presidency does not adapt to shifting opinion in the way that a parliamentary government does. So it is by no means certain that America will help us when we need them, particularly if America has other problems distracting it at the time.

Fear of our neighbors might be irrational, but one thing that worries me is the nuclear waste that is scattered around the world, often in geologically and politically unstable areas. Personally I would be more comfortable if it was skillfully processed, then buried in our sparsely populated and geologically and politically stable land. One form of processing that would make sense would be to use it in a Thorium reactor. This produces CO2-free energy, and at the same time it reduces the radioactivity of the waste to a two hundred year problem instead of thousands of years. Australia has huge reserves of Thorium.

Indeed I think that we shouldn't be shipping out Uranium (or Thorium) and washing our hands of the waste problem. We should take it back, for everyone's greater safety.

There are lots of reasons why storing nuclear waste is a natural economic activity for our technologically advanced and Uranium exporting nation. But there is a huge additional side benefit. Suddenly we are like Canada. We become a nation that America, and other advanced nations, can not afford to let fall into the hands of the bad guys. We no longer have to follow America into every quagmire. We no longer have to submit to their latest schemes to protect their wonderful Intellectual Property from the depredations of Australian consumers.

This is a plan than can be sold to the Australian voters. It will make the World safer if we can get all that nuclear waste stored in deep and stable granite. And by making the Australian voters feel safer, we can turn Australia into a force for peace, as Canada has long been.