Why Global Warming Activists are targeting developed countries for Ideological reasons, and not scientific reasons

Here in Australia we are in the midst of a Federal election campaign, and one of the biggest issues of concern to the electorate (quite rightly) is the global warming crisis. Leaving aside the fact that it is a global issue, so international agreement rather than changing your local member is the only effective way to address the issue, the issue is tending to favour the parties on the 'left' (Labor and the Greens) at the expense of Conservative parties.

On the one hand this makes perfect sense, as global warming is an issue where being progressive and 'taking action' is the only way to solve the problem - being conservative and resisting change ('do nothing') is a recipe for disaster.

Unfortunately, the change being pushed by leftist parties is based on pseudo-scientific justification for their neo-communist, anti-western/capitalist policies. They use the raw 'per capita' emission data as an excuse to lay the blame for global warming entirely at the feet of developed countries, while the reality is that the root cause of the global warming crisis was (and is) global overpopulation. While one person using air conditioning and driving an SUV is bad for the environment, ten people doing so is ten times worse!

The ‘elephant in the room’ with regards to global warming causation is total carbon emissions, and this rise is mostly due to population growth (especially in third world countries), NOT due to the increase in carbon emissions per Capita per se:

As global warming is driven by the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration (IE. Amount per cc of air), it is emissions per sq km that contribute to global warming impact, NOT emissions per capita. (Think about it – doubling the world’s population while keeping total CO2 emissions constant would NOT have any change on global warming, but would instantly reduce the emissions per capita. While doubling the world’s surface area while keeping the total CO2 emissions constant would halve the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere – or, put a more realistic way, halving the amount of total CO2 emissions while keeping surface area constant would obviously halve the rate of CO2 increase). So, who are the big CO2 polluters in terms of actual impact (high CO2 emissions in relation to the country’s land area? – China, followed by Europe, then the USA, then India. A completely different picture than the ‘per capita’ argument pushed by Green Groups that totally ignore the biggest villain in the global warming crisis – China – for ideological reasons:

This shows the total fallacy, and ulterior motives, for Green groups pushing the usual ‘per capita’ propaganda:

By choosing to frame the global warming debate purely in terms of the scientifically invalid ‘per Capita’ measure (which they justify using a spurious notion of ‘fairness’ - make the rich pay), they can ‘prove’ that global warming is entirely due to the big, bad capitalist developed countries, and give the true source of the global warming crisis for the next fifty years – China and India - a free pass.

While this will undoubtedly achieve the Labor/Green goal of Robin Hood economics (steal from the rich and give to the poor), it is also a recipe for global climate disaster. The developed countries are going to spend a fortune on achieving heroic 'per Capita' emission reduction targets, while the developing countries and going to both a) not have to meet the same 'per Capita' targets, and b) also continue to stoke the engine driving climate change - unsustainable population growth.

In fifty years time my children will be suffering from the impacts of global warming, in world with a population having grown by around 50% above current levels - to around 10 billion. And I'm pretty sure the left-wing parties will still be blaming the problem on 'insufficient action' by developed countries, and not on the extra 2.5 billion people added to the global population in the interim.

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Coalition to win the Australian Election?

Yesterday online betting agencies were reporting that Labor was still firm favourite to win tomorrow's federal election, with odds around 1.5 compared to 4 for the coalition picking up enough seats to form government. This was despite the coalition being favoured to pick up a large number of marginal seats in NSW and Queensland (where state Labor governments are decidedly unpopular after years of over-promising and under-delivering). So I placed a $10 bet with Betfair for the coalition to win at odds of 4-to-1), although I'm still doubtful that the coalition will be able to get over the line on the day.

Today the odds on a coalition win have shortened to around 3 (glad I placed my bet yesterday), but Labor is still favourite to win the election. By all appearances this election really will be a close one (they say that nearly every election, despite many of them turning out to be a "landslide" in the end), with the coalition (Liberals and Nationals) having a solid primary vote (over 40%) and likely to pick up a handful of marginal seats in both QLD and NSW, but Labor likely to pick up a couple of seats in NSW (due to a recent redistribution) and also gaining some seats in VIC and SA. Labor is suffering a substantial "protest vote" due to many policy implementation snafus under Rudd (you don't see many "Kevin '11" T-shirts these days!), with their primary vote down in the low 30%'s. However, most of that protest vote is disillusioned socialists giving their vote to local independent or green candidates. Under our preferential voting system the second preference votes will mean that most of these green votes flow back to Labor (usually around 60% of Green votes flow to Labor, this time I expect the Green primary vote will be higher, and that Green preferences will flow 70%+ to Labor).

If the coalition does manage to pick up a dozen marginal NSW and QLD seats, and loses a few seats in NSW and a handful in VIC/SA we are quite likely to be staying up late on Saturday night waiting for the early results to flow in from WA. With the housing affordability and mining tax issues having a big impact in WA (and neither Rudd, Gillard or Abbott coming from WA) the final result may hinge on how many seats the coalition can gain in WA.

While Labor still appears to be favourite to remain in power, the coalition may have sufficient momentum to close the gap by election day. Although Green preferences will offset Labor's poor primary vote to a large extent, in the event of a hung parliament the Libs/Nats have better prospects of doing a deal with the 3-4 independent Representative MPs and being able to form a government in that situation.

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Exactly how fast does broadband need to be?

With the Australian federal election campaign in it's final weeks, the focus yesterday turned to the 'National Broadband' plans of the two major parties. The incumbent Labor party has embarked on a $43 billion dollar scheme that aims to provide access to 100 megabits per second to 97% of the Australian population (apparently it's vitally important for everyone to have fast internet - except for the 3% or so of Australians who live in the remote outback where even Labor concedes providing optical fibre would be too expensive). Supposedly we'll all want to sign up for fast internet once it's available (at around $100 per month), and to ensure maximum uptake (so the government can try to sell off the NBN and recoup the cost) it will apparently be 'opt-out' ie. your house will be connected up unless you say no (I wonder how many households will let their homes be connected, at government expense, but then never agree to open an account and pay for using the NBN?)

The coalition (Liberal/National parties) plan is to 'only' pour about $6 billion of government money into fast broadband, leaving it up to the private sector to invest in providing as much fast broadband as people want.

I think both plans have pitfalls - the Labor plan seems awfully expensive (over $2000 per man, woman and child in the country!) and assumes that everyone needs 100 Mbps internet access. I use the internet a lot for my uni studies, online financial transactions, share and CFD trading etc. and the modest speed of 3.6 Mbps download and 0.1 Mbps upload provided by my cable connection is fine. Unless I wanted to download movies every day, I can't see any need to faster access. So the coalitions plan, providing 12 Mbps to 97% of the population (and up to 100 Mbps in some cases) seems more than adequate. However, by just providing limited funding and relying on the private sector, some areas (with lower demand) will end up missing out - so spending the extra $36 billion will undoubtedly help address 'social equity' concerns (but not, for example, aborigines living in remote settlements in central Australia).

A recent poll by the SMH showed less than 20% of people supported the coalition's 'cheap' option - apparently everyone would like fast internet (as long as the government is footing the bill). As usual, there is a disconnect between the voters desire for lower taxes, a balanced budget, and massive government spending to provide 'free' services.
All in all, I'm dubious that it will turn out to be worthwhile spending $44 billion dollars to 'fibre up' Australia - as with most high technology fields, there is likely to be a faster and cheaper option available within a few years, making the current expenditure a) wasteful, and b) unlikely to be recouped by selling off the NBN once it's up and running. I also doubt that more than 10% of the population has any economic/business need for the NBN. Spending about $6,000 of public money per household to provide fast download of movies and video phone calls seems a huge waste.

Many of the critics of the coalition's NBN-lite policy appear to have vested interest in the government spending $44 billion on NBN - for example Optus sees the NBN as a means for the government to strip away a large part of Telstra's residual infrastructure advantage. And some commentators, such as Rod Tucker appear to be both biased (since he is paid as Director of the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) and Director of the Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN)) and misguided. He wrote that "Building a broadband network will, as the government has pointed out, have the same kind of transformational impact as the railways in the 19th and 20th centuries" - I suggest he reads up on the 'railway bubble' of the late 19th century in the UK. At that time everyone was entranced by the revolutionary technology of the railway line, prompting dozens of schemes to build myriad railway lines to every urban centre in the UK. Vast fortunes were lost when most of the schemes were found to be uneconomic (not enough patronage), although in that fiasco it was mostly private investors who paid for their folly. In any event, the 'revolutionary' technology of railway transport was soon competing against the motor car and later on with air transport.

Subscribe to Enough Wealth. Copyright 2006-2010

Losing is Lucrative

It turns out that losing an election can be financially rewarding. Ex-prime minister John Howard will get an annual pension of $345,000 a year in retirement. This is around $15,000 a year more than he earned as prime minister. He also has the option to take a $1.5 million lump sum payout, and get a reduced pension of about $170,000.

Another person who has turned making money out of losing elections into an art form is the former One Nation party leader, Pauline Hanson. She looks likely to achieve the 4% share of the Queensland Senate vote required to get electoral funding for "costs". In 2004 Hanson got $200,000 to cover the costs of her failed Senate campaign which cost just $35,426 - netting her a profit of around $165,000 for nominating and running a low-budget election campaign for less than two months. This time she is likely to make even more out of losing the election. Of course, if she'd won she would have received this funding and had a well-paid eight year term in the Senate.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Australia goes Left and Green

Labor has won a clear majority in yesterday's election - counting of postal votes is still likely to decide a couple of seats that are in doubt, but it looks like the new Prime Minister Mr Rudd will have 86 or 88 seats, giving a majority of around 11. It turned out that Labor won more seats in QLD than I had expected yesterday evening, and the Liberals didn't win any seats from Labor in WA.

A plot of majority (as a percentage of total seats) for all post-war Australian elections is quite interesting. As you can see below, yesterday's result is the best Labor has had since the first win by Bob Hawke back in the early 80's. It's big enough that Labor is likely to have at least two terms in office, which probably explains why Mr Costello has decided not to contest the leadership of the Liberal party.



As I've said previously, the policies announced during the election campaign were fairly mild. It will be interesting to see what surprises may turn up in the first Labor budget next May. Labor appealed to the green voter more than the Liberals, with promises to ratify "Kyoto" and be more pro-active about setting 'aspirational' greenhouse gas emission targets. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the longer term, as Australia is largely dependent on coal-fired power stations and exports a lot of coal. Labor has a reasonably strong anti-nuclear policy, which means that Australia won't be getting any nuclear power generation capacity in the foreseeable future. However, their policy to not expand on uranium production for export may conflict with the increase in the use of nuclear power in SE Asian countries and China.

It will also be interesting to see how Prime Minister Rudd handles the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq next year, while leaving anout 2/3 of the troops there for embassy security and "support" roles. The ALP is also going to keep the Australian tropps in Afghanistan, which may become the next foci of anti-war protestors in Australia. In recent weeks there have been several Australian servicemen killed in Afghanistan, and the latest fire-fight seems to have also killed some Afghan civilians. Next election we could see the "No War" protestors targetting the ALP, just as in the UK.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007

Labor Wins Australian Election?

Looks like the opinion polls were correct and the Australian Labor Party will win today's Federal election. Counting hasn't produced figures for WA yet, but the results from NSW and QLD look like the ALP will win enough seats to form government. I'd guess the ALP will end up with a small majority of only 2-5 seats.

The published policies of the two parties were pretty similar, apart from withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and unwinding of the "work choices" legislation by Labor if they win. However, the big risk is that with the economy growing strongly, unemployment at 4% and inflation heading above 3%, an ALP win will result in a wages break-out, which will boost inflation. This will in turn require larger interest rate rises by the RBA. If this ends up coinciding with a global slow-down (lead by the US) it could mean Australia has it's first recession for more than ten years, and unemployment heads back up again. Unfortunately Labor policies to boost productivity by increased spending on skills training will take longer to have any impact than would the removal of Work Choices and a resurgence in union campaigns for wage rises. We'll see how things work out over the next three or four years. If Labor ends up with a slim majority and the economy runs into troubles during this period we could end up with a one term Labor government.

Copyright Enough Wealth 2007