Tag Archives: environment

Since I wrote my post on good climate news for 2017, a couple of news items have caught my eye * Britain now generates twice as much electricity from wind as from coal, and around 30 per cent from renewables in total * More than half the vehicles sold in Norway are now electric or plug in hybrid My thoughts on these examples over the fold: TL;DR version: These examples show that, at least for developed countries, massive reductions in CO2 emissions are feasible right now, with no...

I’ve just been advised that my latest article “The importance of ‘extremely unlikely’ events: Tail risk and the costs of climate change” has come out online in The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. For those who can use it, the DOI is 10.1111/1467-8489.12238. For everyone else, here’s a link to a pre-publication version. The main points are * The IPCC convention is to use the phrase “extremely unlikely” to refer to outcomes (in particular, values of climate...

I’ve published a couple of articles recently on climate issues. One, in Inside Story, is an expansion of a post here, making the case that 2017 was a good year for climate policy globally. One more item to add to the list: India’s additions of coal-fired generation capacity are running at the slowest pace since 2006. The other, in New Matilda, was about the (lousy) economics of the Adani coal mine-rail-port project. It’s part of a series on the struggle against the mine by indigenous...

Ten years ago, when Bob Brown and the Greens called for a plan to end coal exports, their position was way outside the Oveandrton Window (the range of opinions taken seriously by the political class and commentariat). Ten years later, it’s entirely normal for financial institutions to announce that they will no longer fund coal projects, and for major national governments to join an alliance with the self-explanatory title Powering Past Coal. The news isn’t all good. For a variety of...

After years of campaigning, it finally looks as if the Adani mine-rail-port proposal in the Galilee Basin has been defeated. A week after the Palaszczuk government was re-elected on a promise to veto funding from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, the two biggest Chinese banks have announced that they will not be lending to the project either. The election outcome is particularly striking. Premier Palaszczuk executed a rather inelegant backflip on this question after it...

Posted by Nick Falvo under aboriginal peoples, Alberta, budgets, Child Care, cities, demographics, education, employment, environment, fiscal federalism, fiscal policy, gender critique, homeless, housing, HST, income, income distribution, income support, Indigenous people, inflation, minimum wage, municipalities, NDP, oil and gas, poverty, privatization, progressive economic strategies, Role of government, social policy, taxation, wages, women. November 29th, 2017Comments:...

In the final week of the Queensland election campaign, I’ve been busy trying to do what I can to influence the result. I’ve put out a couple of opinion pieces about the choice between coal and renewable energy. This one, in The Guardian, focuses on the central role of the culture war in motivating rightwing opposition to renewable energy. In The Conversation, I look at the economics and business aspects and debunk the idea that ‘ultrasupercritical’ technology makes coal-fired power a...

The International Energy Agency recently released data showing that world coal production fell sharply in 2016, mainly because of big cuts in China. Looking at the graph, it appears that the peak in production was around 2013. The price of coal has experienced a “dead cat bounce” over the last year or so, essentially because China has been closing coal mines faster than it’s been closing or cancelling coal-fired power stations, but the picture tells the story for the future. Global coal...

A steady stream of negative evidence hasn’t shaken the faith of believers in nuclear energy. Many of them are under the impression that the failure of nuclear energy is specific to the developed world, where some combination of environmentalism and NIMBYism prevents the adoption of an obviously sensible solution. It is widely imagined that China, India and other countries are forging ahead. This idea was plausible until fairly recently, but the latest evidence suggests that nuclear power...

In my Conversation article on the Turnbull government’s plan to keep coal-fired electricity alive, I said that most of the opportunities for hydro-electric power had already been exploited. I was thinking of primary power generation, and in this respect, I maintain my view. However, I neglected the option of pumped storage, where water is pumped uphill when excess electricity is available, then run downhill through turbines to (re)generate the electricity when it is most needed. My old...