Tag Archives: environment

I’ve managed to get a little free time, and I’ve decided to do a series of posts looking at the vital question of whether we are on the way to ending reliance on coal as a source of energy. I’m going to focus first on thermal coal used for electricity generation. We have the apparent contradiction of a resurgence in coal prices combined with ample evidence that new coal plants are no longer economic, and that, when health costs are taken into account, the same is true of most existing...

If all the coal in the Galilee Basin were burned, it would make it just about impossible to stabilize the global climate. Most attention has been focused on the Adani Group’s proposal for an integrated mine-rail-port project to develop its proposed Carmichael mine. There are however a string of would-be followers, including GVK Hancock and Clive Palmer. The good news is that Adani’s March deadline for financial close, itself a deferral of earlier promises, has passed with no sign of...

The Grattan Institute has just released a report blaming high electricity network costs on public ownership and excessive reliability standards. I commented on a draft of the report, but there wasn’t much change in relation to my comments. My comments are over the fold. Let me offer the following, slightly ad hominem argument. Grattan has backed the National Energy Guarantee, a radical change in Australia’s energy policy, which was justified mainly by the occurrence of a single blackout...

That’s my suggestion for the way Bill Shorten can resolve his continuing problems over the Adani Carmichael mine-port-rail project. To spell it out, he should set a deadline (say June 30) for Adani to achieve financial close for the entire project, and commence construction. If the deadline isn’t met, Labor should oppose the project outright. This is only a marginal variant on the position of leading Adani supporter, Jenny Hill, who suggested a six month deadline in February. So, it...

I’ve written a blog post about this year’s Alternative Federal Budget (AFB). Points raised in the blog post include the following: -This year’s AFB would create 470,000 (full-time equivalent) jobs in its first year alone. By year 2 of the plan, 600,000 new (full-time equivalent) jobs will exist. -This year’s AFB will also bring in universal pharmacare, address involuntary part-time employment among women, eliminate tuition fees for all post-secondary students in Canada, speed up...

It’s just been announced that Aurizon is not pursuing its application to the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to build a rail line to the Galilee Basin, essentially because the company hasn’t been able to secure any commitments from putative customers (most obviously Adani and GVK Hancock but also Clive Palmer and others). This is great news. It’s now highly unlikely that coal mining in the Galilee Basin will go ahead any time soon. Opening the Galilee Basin would have been a...

… there’s no more time to waste. That’s the headline for a piece in The Conversation I’ve signed along with a dozen or so prominent scientists and economists who have worked for many years on the problems of the Murray Darling Basin. It’s been released along with a Declaration, reproduced over the fold. declaration We, the undersigned, call for: One: A halt to all publicly-funded water recovery associated with irrigation infrastructure subsidies/grants in the Murray-Darling Basin, until...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Balding and bespectacled, with an unmistakable New York accent, Thomas has spent more than 30 years in the foreign service, serving in U.S. missions from Nigeria to India to the Philippines — but nowhere was he treated quite like this. “My staff and I are called names that the Ku Klux Klan doesn’t even use anymore,” he said. (* disclaimer: I don’t know anything about him or the Cape Town water & behavior project, but it...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick housekeeping item, if you haven’t seen. Chris migrated his site to new servers so had some downtime this week, but all the content should be back up by now. They’re still getting SSL set up so your browser may warn you that you’re not reading in https yet (so don’t enter your credit card information into the comments till that’s squared away). Jobs: A really interesting feature story and blog posts from the New York...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick housekeeping item, if you haven’t seen. Chris migrated his site to new servers so had some downtime this week, but all the content should be back up by now. They’re still getting SSL set up so your browser may warn you that you’re not reading in https yet (so don’t enter your credit card information into the comments till that’s squared away). Jobs: A really interesting feature story and blog posts from the New York...