John Quiggin

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

It now looks possible that the fate of the Adani Carmichael mine will be sealed by an adverse assessment of the mine’s impact on the black-throated finch. That’s a far less satisfactory outcome than if the Queensland Land and Environment Court had accepted, as its NSW counterpart has done, that the climate (and health) damage from burning the coal produced by the mine was relevant in assessing the costs and benefits. That reasoning leads to the conclusion that no new mines should...

Opportunity cost provides the best way to think about the recent decision to reject a new coal mine at Rocky Hill. That’s the central theme of my latest piece in Inside Story and also of my forthcoming book, Economics in Two Lessons. Given a tight budget of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we can afford to emit while stabilizing the global climate, every new source of emissions comes at the opportunity cost of an existing source. Since phasing out coal is among the...

I’ve spend the last few days at a workshop on the transition to a renewable energy supply for Australia, which focused primarily on electricity. The presentations should be available soon, and I’ll write a longer post if I get time, but here are a couple of quick points I took away. Adding storage to a system that is at or close to 100 per cent renewable will cost around $25/MWh, that is, about 2.5 cents/kWhThe big problem for Australia is transmission, to connect solar and wind...

After the righteous fury that pervaded Royal Commissioner Hayne’s interim report on the financial system, the final recommendations came as a letdown to everyone (except of course the insiders who bid up bank shares in anticipation of the news). This ought not to have been a surprise. Hayne correctly identified greed and dishonesty as the key drivers of wrongdoing. But greed (or, more politely, incentive) is the guiding principle of financialised capitalism as is seeking profit to...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

Readers may be familiar with the concepts of “subtweeting” and “vaguebooking”, referring to social media posts which are clearly aimed at someone in particular who is, however, unnamed. (There’s nothing specifically “new media” in this – the Oz does it pretty regularly, for example.) I’ve just had the reverse experience. An article in the Guardian by Eugenie Joseph of the Centre for Independent Studies starts out by linking to my piece on a (partially) socialist utopia, also in the...

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. Like this:Like Loading...

Back in 2004, I wrote that There is only one real instance of political correctness in Australia today and that is that you are never, ever allowed to call anyone a racist. It’s OK to say that Adolf Hitler was a racist, and that apartheid was racist, but the idea that any actual Australian could be a racist is utterly taboo. (Update): 1. That hasn’t changed. As the comments to this post illustrate, even describing the taboo is sufficient to trigger it. 2. As is always the case...