Victor Conrad’s missing data

Ever since reading Robert Dewar and James Wallis’ ‘Geographical Patterning of Interannual Rainfall Variability in the Tropics and Near Tropics’ about two decades ago, it has occured to me that when the authors say:

“Conrad mapped variability in precipitation for the entire world, using records from 384 stations. For the area between 30˚N and 30˚S, he had 149 stations.”

Yet, Dewar and Wallis fail to note that for many of the high-variability regions they discuss, Conrad had no stations whatsoever. This is true particularly for:

1. Queensland
2. eastern Melanesia (the “Fiji–New Caledonia” region of Ropelewski and Halpert)
• of the regions discussed by Ropelewski and Halpert as having coherent El Niño Southern Oscillation precipitation responses, “Fiji–New Caledonia” is the only one where all stations in Dewar and Wallis’ database are “highly variable”
3. northwestern coastal Australia
4. coastal Angola
5. eastern Kenya and Somalia (“Greater Somalia”)
• if you read ‘Geographical Patterning of Interannual Rainfall Variability in the Tropics and Near Tropics’ you will see that Dewar and Wallis do discuss the Horn of Africa as noted by Conrad
• in reality, Conrad had no stations between Zanzibar and Aden, nor in present-day Ethiopia or Eritrea
6. Baja California
• of all the high-variability regions in the 1999 dataset, Baja is undoubtedly the most “excusable”, at least in the sense that no data for the region existed as of 1928 when Conrad’s data was collected

Asking the question on Google, I have discovered that the reason most of Australia and eastern Melanesia were unsampled in Victor Conrad‘s 1941 study. Apart from a few stations published in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society — which were those listed by Conrad — Australia’s large assembly of meteorological records was some of the world’s most extensive but also most fragmented:

1. before the formation of the national Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) in 1908, rainfall data was collected independently by individual Australian colonies (states like New South Wales, Queensland, etc.)
2. each colony or state published its own monthly meteorological summaries
3. these were mostly distributed locally or held in national and state archives and libraries rather than in global meteorological circulars
4. records were held locally or in state archives like the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s state volumes
1. the great majority of stations in Australia (and Melanesia) thus had their records published only in state-specific histories and never in global summaries
2. the vast majority of high-quality long-term records remained “buried” in colonial-era journals, ship logs, or government documents
3. global sources like Smithsonian’s World Weather Records rarely carried data from these regions

Most Australian and Melanesian meteorological records when Conrad was writing were thus localised and inaccessible to international researchers, being not yet integrated into widely-circulated international compendiums. The most important of these were the UK’s Meteorological Office and the Smithsonian Institution’s World Weather Records.

Even so, one might argue that articles like Steven Sargent Visher’s ‘Variability Versus Uniformity in the Tropics’ published nineteen full years before Conrad’s work should have provided enough data for Onslow and perhaps other parts of tropical Australia. It is possible that the raw data used by Visher were not kept in his archives, but the basic information should have been available to Conrad yet he clearly did not use it.

What I will do below is:

1. select a representative list of stations in areas of Australia not covered by Conrad
1. only data from 1928 and before — when his first data were compiled — are included
2. data will be done in a calendar year format as they were done by Conrad
3. data will be tabulated as Conrad did for his actual stations, although I have omitted latitude and longitude
4. I have deviated from Conrad in ordering stations by region in a clockwise order, rather than purely by longitude as Conrad did
2. compile:
1. mean annual rainfall by calendar year to 1928
2. average departure from the mean, and then comparing it in two ways with Conrad’s expected value:
1. by simple difference, as Conrad did
2. by ratio to expected average deviation minus 100 percent

Method 2) was added because studying Conrad’s article does suggest that areas of high rainfall but abnormal variability are not easily identified by mere difference from expected value. Of the few high-variability regions identified by Dewar and Wallis for which Conrad did have data, two — the northern South China Sea region and lowland eastern Indonesia — were not identified by Conrad as regions of abnormal variability, not discussed as such. This despite the fact that Nha Trang and Ambon Island were shown as having a variability that was clearly exceptional, whilst nearby stations had sufficiently high variability that a pattern could quite likely have been recognised. Conrad’s failure to recognise the northern South China Sea and lowland eastern Indonesia as areas of unusual rainfall variability related to his use of arithmetic rather than geometric (as used by Dewar and Wallis and by Pierre Camberlin’s 2010 ‘More variable tropical climates have a slower demographic growth’) departure.

Explanatory Shading:

1. Departures above 20 percent or more than twice Conrad’s expected value have been shaded in dark red
2. Departures above 10 percent but below 20 percent or more than 1.5 times but less than than twice Conrad’s expected value have been shaded in red
3. Departures above 5 percent but below 10 percent or more than 1.25 times but less than than 1.5 Conrad’s expected value have been shaded in pink
4. stations who departure is less than 5 percent and/or less than 1.25 times Conrad’s expected value are unshaded

Representative Stations from Areas of Australia Unrepresented in Conrad’s Study (Courtesy Australian Bureau of Meteorology):

Region	Station	Elevation		Mean		Average deviation		Percent	% deviation from expected	departure as % of expected
		feet	metres	inches	millimetres	inches	millimetres
Tropical Queensland	Boulia	532	162	10.6	269	5.53	141	52%	+28%	+117.43%
	Burketown	20	6	27.9	709	10.04	255	36%	+18%	+99.70%
	Coen	653	199	46.7	1,187	11.47	291	25%	+9%	+58.37%
	Cooktown	20	6	69.9	1,775	17.23	438	25%	+10%	+64.36%
	Innisfail	33	10	142.8	3,627	26.13	664	18%	+4%	+30.71%
	Townsville	13	4	47.3	1,203	13.59	345	29%	+13%	+79.46%
	Rockhampton	36	11	39.2	995	10.70	272	27%	+11%	+70.65%
	Barcaldine	876	267	19.8	502	6.86	174	35%	+16%	+87.67%
Murray–Darling Basin	Roma	981	299	23.6	599	6.87	174	29%	+11%	+61.80%
	Tamworth	1,326	404	26.8	682	5.07	129	19%	+1%	+4.95%
	Dubbo	853	260	22.2	563	5.22	133	24%	+6%	+30.82%
	Albury	515	157	27.9	709	4.72	120	17%	-1%	-6.02%
	Wentworth	121	37	11.8	301	3.13	79	26%	+4%	+19.96%
Western Interior	Daly Waters	696	212	26.4	670	6.71	170	25%	+7%	+41.29%
	Tennant Creek	1,237	377	14.4	366	5.10	129	35%	+15%	+77.03%
	Moonaree	787	240	7.4	187	2.44	62	33%	+6%	+22.76%
	Wiluna	1,709	521	9.6	244	3.18	81	33%	+8%	+32.48%
	Mount Magnet	1,398	426	9.4	239	3.53	90	38%	+13%	+50.14%
	Halls Creek	1,181	360	21.0	532	6.04	154	29%	+11%	+60.25%
West Coastal	Geraldton	10	3	18.5	469	3.87	98	21%	+2%	+13.36%
	Carnarvon	16	5	9.5	241	3.61	92	38%	+13%	+52.57%
	Onslow	13	4	9.0	228	5.46	139	61%	+36%	+143.67%
	Roebourne	39	12	11.7	297	4.78	121	41%	+19%	+86.16%
	Derby	26	8	25.8	655	8.01	204	31%	+13%	+72.53%
Southern Coastal	Bega	164	50	33.5	852	9.25	235	28%	+11%	+62.23%
	Melbourne	102	31	25.5	648	3.78	96	15%	-3%	-17.66%
	Hobart	171	52	23.9	608	4.26	108	18%	0%	-1.18%
	Eucla	305	93	10.0	253	2.13	54	21%	-3%	-10.88%
	Albany	10	3	37.3	947	4.98	127	13%	-3%	-18.98%

Results:

The results clearly show that if Conrad could have obtained existing data for tropical Queensland — extending into the extreme northern Murray–Darling Basin represented by Roma — and the north of Western Australia, he would have recognised them as regions of abnormal rainfall variability analogous to Northeastern Brazil and the northwestern Indian subcontinent. This is true even if we use Conrad’s arithmetic departure method. By geometric departure, as I presumed, tropical Queensland appears somewhat more variable relative to Conrad’s calculated expected value, and the southern arid zone less so. This difference, however, is less than I anticipated.

It is quite possible that had Conrad some of the data tabulated above, he would have seen the two as one region of unusual rainfall variability: the figures for the central Northern Territory [Tennant Creek and Daly Waters] make this quite plausible. However, mechanistically, Queensland is more closely related to lowland eastern Indonesia and eastern Melanesia than to northwestern Australia. The high variability of the latter region is purely due to dependence for rainfall upon random tropical cyclonic disturbances that frequently produce a year’s rain in two or three days. Contrariwise, lowland eastern Indonesia, eastern Melanesia, and almost all of Queensland owe their high variability to lying in the core of the “ENSO horseshoe” where convection is most sensitive to El Niño and La Niña events. The geometric departures in Boulia and Burketown, it might be noted, are only slightly higher than Conrad tabulated for Ambon Island [+87 percent].

The south coast of New South Wales, represented by Bega, is similar to northwest Australia in owing its high variability to distinctly random Tasman Sea cyclones producing exceptionally heavy rainfall.

The remaining unsampled regions of Australia — tabulated here for both fairness and completeness — do not show much surprise in light of later studies like those of Dewar, Eddie van Etten and Camberlin.

‘Commerce and Coalitions’ III — The Nature of Capital- and Land-Rich, Labour-Poor societies

In my first post reviewing Ron Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, I said I would discuss the numerous issues raised by capital-rich, land-rich and labour-poor economies. Since the book was originally published, the effect of these problems has undoubtedly been multiplied: many of the problematic political and social trends since the 1973 oil crisis can easily be understood in terms of the expected political behaviour of economies rich in capital and land, but poor in labour, under a condition of rapidly expanding trade. This behaviour is, at first sight, contradictory when compared to other economies, but understandable in terms of their basic endowments and structures.

In my review of Commerce and Coalitions, and my communication with Rogowski via email, I noted the absence of capital- and land-rich, labour-poor regions for long periods (in fact for millennia), and that no explanation was given in the book, as if this extremely prolonged absence was accidental and inexplicable.

Why Were Capital- and Land-Rich, Labour-Poor Economies Nonexistent for So Long?

The most significant thing about societies abundant in capital and land but poor in labour is that for almost nineteen centuries at a minimum they were completely nonexistent. Although Rogowski notes that one area in Classical Greece — Miletus, comprising present-day Western Anatolia — was rich in both capital and land, his studies of both the contracting trade of the declining Roman Empire and the expanding trade of the long sixteenth century reveal no region abundant in both capital and land but poor in labour. Rogowski is definite about the lack of capital- and land-rich regions not merely during the long sixteenth century, but until the beginning of the twentieth century. His analysis of the declining Roman Empire is less conclusive but provides no evidence for any region rich in both capital and land.

Rogowski himself seems to have assumed this as coincidence, but given its persistence for two millennia, coincidence seems improbable. My initial reaction was that simultaneously capital- and land-rich economies were the product of lithophile metallurgy, for their emergence at the beginning of the twentieth century coincides therewith; however, upon rereading and noting the case of Miletus, I realised that this is, minimally, simplistic. A re-write of our question would ask why capital was never accumulated within land-rich regions? Evidence does suggest that there may exist unique difficulties accumulating capital in a land-rich region during expanding trade. Because labour, when scarcest, can normally be controlled via methods like slavery, serfdom, niẓām al-kafāla or mass incarceration, if capital be scarce there usually exists disincentive to replace labour with capital in land-rich economies.  Evsey Domar in his 1970 “The Causes of Slavery: A Hypothesis”, argues that owners of labour in land-rich economies gain their wealth from labour, and ownership of land is not so important. Consistent with this, Rogowski implicitly argued that land-rich Russia accumulated labour — not capital — during and after the long sixteenth century, and that this ultimately created an anti-capitalist, anti-Tsar coalition which made the Bolshevik Revolution.

Capital is inherently less powerless than slave or serf labour, while its preferences do not ipso facto coincide with the landed elites’. Contrariwise, where labour is abundant and gains (potential) power via increased trade, the scarce factors of capital and land possess incentive to replace militant labour with capital, thus accumulating the latter.

That land-rich economies began to seriously accumulate capital only via tariffs in North America, Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century, and Latin America in the middle twentieth century, supports the hypothesis that expansion of capital is difficult in land-rich economies during rising trade. In the Gulf States, the fact that oil was owned by the monarchs from the beginning of extraction and is extremely capital-intensive, meant that the conflicts noted above were completely bypassed. Possibly critical was abolition of slavery or serfdom, which weakened disincentives to replace labour by capital, and also accompanied capital accumulation in the Gulf States. (The ruling classes, as noted earlier, were always able to reorganise labour control.) These arguments are not conclusive, for most land-rich economies without slavery or serfdom still have never accumulated significant capital, while earlier changes to labour or trade structures were not accompanied thereby.

Where The Powerful Are The Rebellious

The counterintuitive, but critical, feature of an economy rich in capital and land, but poor in labour, is that under expanding trade, it is the powerful who rebel. This is because owners of capital and land can then use their ownership of agricultural products, minerals and capital-intensive manufactures to gain economic power in the world market. “Rebellion of the powerful” was noted in American politics as early as Kevin P. Phillips’ 1969 The Emerging Republican Majority, which argued that Richard Nixon’s 1968 election victory was produced by a rebellion by rural and suburban white America against government-enforced civil rights for blacks. Phillips ignored the role of America’s capitalist class in producing GOP dominance at a presidential level from 1968, while his Obama-era preface ignored the 1994 Republican Revolution entirely. Nonetheless, Phillips does demonstrate how American politics has been dominated by rebellions of the powerful — Southern, Plains and Mountain landowners, and since the 1970s, capitalists. With each new generation of Republicans the demands of richest one percent, even the richest 0.01 percent, for elimination of potential balances of power become ever-more extreme. Current GOP ideology originated from Murray Newton Rothbard and James McGill Buchanan. During the 1960s and 1970s these two, in exact opposition to Marx, saw capitalists as “makers” and the majority as “takers”. Their de facto argument was:

1. the only legitimate state was a privately owned state that gained all income via earning money
• this method is primarily used today by the Gulf oil monarchies
• its impossibility in resource-impoverished Europe and East Asia — where marketable natural resources have been destroyed by glaciation and orogeny — undoubtedly played a key role in those regions’ political development
2. taxation was, ipso facto, theft from the “makers”
3. public debt (following the classification of states on page 18 of ‘The Politics of the Invisible: Offshore Finance and State Power’) was also ipso facto theft from the makers because it devalued their saved wealth

Rebellion of the powerful can also be seen in al-Qa^cida and other Muslim terrorists substantially supported by Gulf royalty, who similarly monopolise local gains from increasing trade. The goal of these terrorists, like the contemporary Republican Party, is eliminating all potential balances of power via either:

1. legitimising absolute monarchy as divinely ordained (until Rerum Novarum orthodox Christianity held similar views) and making capitalists part of the ruling families
2. declaring that God’s laws are divine and cannot be challenged by the masses and a theocracy or caliphate as the only legitimate government

One can detect similar attitudes in Vladimir Putin, and also in the Palmer United Party, and even John Howard in Australia. Under expanding trade, the wealth of the capital–land coalition, as noted by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page in Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America and Thomas Paul Bonfiglio in The Psychopathology of American Capitalism, makes labour-based political organisations financially powerless. Labour within the public sphere — and in the Gulf States and substantially the US labour stands entirely absent therefrom — becomes extremely timid, focusing merely upon limiting further transfers of wealth to the rich, or, as we shall see, colonising external labour into a hierarchically split market.

Split Labour Markets and “Labour Imperialism”

In the middle 1970s, University of California Riverside professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies Edna Bonacich argued in ‘Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Race Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation’, and ‘Abolition, the Extension of Slavery, and the Position of Free Blacks: A Study of Split Labor Markets in the United States, 1830-1863’ that the United States has been always characterised by a “split labour market” based upon wage differentials between blacks and whites and formal or informal rules to hire blacks last and fire them first. This is an extremely efficient means for controlling scarce labour because it pits nonelites against each other. Under expanding trade the scarcity of labour means labour-intensive tradable industries are moved to labour-rich regions and nonelites work only in nontradable industries. Jacobin noted in November 2019 that nontradable industries possess very limited power to produce class solidarity. This would be multiply so when capital neither loses from trade nor needs compromises with labour.

Split labour markets are also characteristics of the Gulf States, where the majority — in Qaṭar as much as 98 percent — of private sector work is done by expatriates, mostly from the labour-rich Levant and South Asia, where their remittances (despite the extreme exploitation of niẓām al-kafāla) are frequently the largest single source of domestic revenue. These workers have no bargaining power because:

1. they cannot obtain citizenship:
1. de jure for non-Muslims in at least the majority of GCC states
2. de facto for almost all non-Arab Muslims and the majority of Arab Muslims
2. they are forbidden from forming organisations to represent their interests
3. they can be fired at will by citizen employers
4. they can never own capital and usually cannot own land
   

The effect of remittance dependence is undoubtedly profound. It blocks workers in countries like the Levant, Pakistan and substantially tropical Asia from gaining via expanding trade in labour-intensive industries. Instead, workers sacrifice all political rights both at home and abroad for a restricted economic gain. Politically, in fact, workers lose both at home and in their new abodes. De facto Gulf citizen control over workers from backward, labour-rich countries means that conservative authoritarian regimes gain unchallenged power. Their nations’ scarcity of capital and resources means these authoritarian rulers could not challenge the Gulf rulers even if they wished to — and their risk-averse nature precludes them so wishing. This system constitutes labour imperialism: the Gulf States control neighbouring labour-rich nations via remittances and niẓām al-kafāla to ensure an adequate labour supply at low cost. Similar labour imperialist relationships, although less rigid, also exist between:

1. the United States and Central America plus the non-Stalinist Caribbean
2. Australia and noncontinental Oceania
3. Russia and Kazakhstan with the labor-supply nations of Tajikistan and the Caucasus

These relationships undoubtedly blockade necessary challenges to the international power of the United States, Australia and the GCC nations, especially over the critical issue of climate change. Because the workers of the labour-rich nations are not engaging in tradable activities, they cannot generate solidarity against their imperialist oppressors. Free trade serves to intensify the dependence of the most oppressed and labour-rich nations upon the new capital- and land-rich imperialist powers. It can even benefit the public sectors of the imperialist powers whilst weakening those of oppressed nations.

Misconceptions from Absence

There are certain popular theories — even amongst scholars — which may be unconsciously based upon situations where societies abundant in capital and land, but poor in labour, were nonexistent or almost so.

1. Development Produces Democratisation

The first theorem that shows a lack of understanding of societies rich in capital and land is that a developed society will always be at least partially democratic, stated by such writers as Robert Dahl and James A. Robinson. This assumption is, upon analysis, clearly based on the assumption that “developed” societies are labour-rich, which was consistently true between the birth of Christ and the end of the nineteenth century. Under this scenario, workers gained alongside capital in the most developed and powerful nations through a democratisation based upon challenges to the landowning class. Due to their opposed positions on trade, capitalists in advanced nations could not consistently ally with landowners to defeat the demands of labour for democracy. Even in nations rich in land but poor in capital and labour, the inability of capital and land to ally strongly meant that democratisation was frequently possible.

When, however, capital has benefitted from rising access to trade and labour has not, capital will seek to expand trade to increase its gains and labour’s losses by:

1. colonising internal and external labour sources over which capital and land have unlimited control
2. expanding the power of capital sufficiently to disenfranchise labour either de jure or de facto
3. privatising the functions of government so that the actual workers have no say in how they are carried out
   

Similarly, the number of individuals, in the words of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George W. Downs

“with sufficient time, education, and money to get involved in politics”

will actually decrease as the economy grows. Economic growth becomes monopolised by a tinier and tinier minority while the majority possess less and less free time for politics as ruling elites makes more and more demands on them as workers, and the money and resources required to challenge rulers multiplies. Thus, a highly developed land-rich nation is likely to become less and less democratic as it accumulates capital. Labour — the sine qua non for democratisation — becomes totally powerless. This can be see through the history of voter turnout in the United States:

1. high turnout of eligible voters before capital became abundant
2. rapidly decreasing turnout amongst the lower classes as the coalition of capital and land made voting more difficult after about 1900
3. moderate increases in turnout between the New Deal and the 1973 oil crisis
4. falling turnout with mass incarceration and increasing disfranchisement since the middle 1970s
   

2. Isolation Produces Social Reaction

Closely related to (1) immediately above is the idea that an isolated society is necessarily backward. Whilst this point is much hard to establish than the first, there is enough evidence to question this assumption as reflecting the absence of capital- and land-rich societies during such periods as the declining Roman Empire. Although Rogowski is less clear about the relative abundances of capital, land and labour there, he provides zero evidence that any region of the declining Roman Empire was relatively abundant in both capital and land. This may account for the strength of religion in the ensuing Middle Ages. With no region where only labour benefitted from collapsing trade, political liberation by democratisation, secularisation, and a more scientific approach, which would if strictly applied help the masses, was disfavoured everywhere during the reduced trade of the Middle Ages.

That social reaction is not a necessary product of isolation can be seen in certain sects in the antebellum United States, such as the Shakers, who were the first to buy blacks from slavery at a time when conditions for them were increasingly bleak, and gave women social equality before they gained the right to vote in land-poor societies. The pre-Sichtungszeit Moravians constituted another example, but there were many other communities of this type before the great globalisation of the late nineteenth century (a useful look can be found in Visiting Utopian Communities: a Guide to the Shakers, Moravians, and Others by Gerald and Patricia Gutek). Intentional, experimental communities are, one might argue, a likely product of a capital- and land-rich society increasingly valuing labour under falling trade. Similarly, social experiments in communal living in North America during the 1960s might be viewed as a product of restricted trade under Bretton Woods, by which workers develop innovative means of decision-making and agreements to work for the community.

In fact, the tendency of ruling classes in this type of society to divide nonelites means such sects and communes are likely whenever trade is not expanding. Nonelites, when they do gain economically, will prefer to associate only with culturally similar peers rather the unite collectively. It would, theoretically at least, mean powerful separatist movements and the creation of numerous small states or even microstates, but this would probably on second thought be countered by the reluctance of these societies to participate in politics.

3. Underestimated Ruling Class Militancy

Another, more significant, effect of the absence of economies rich in both capital and land is the assumption that the ruling class can never be as militant as the working class. However, the radical capitalism of the modern GOP and the militant Islam supported by the Gulf States are extremely militant movements with undoubted ruling class bases, as is the movement for reconquest of Ukraine in Russia, and Pan-Turkism in Central Asia. Rogowski can be faulted for assuming that under expanding trade, ruling classes in advanced nations with high land:labour ratios will simply be content with corporatisation and severe weakening or elimination of unions. In fact, since the 1973 oil crisis the global ruling class has sought to entirely eliminate the freedom of workers, seen in “noncompete” agreements between corporations that virtually eliminate the freedom of many US workers to seek alternative employment, and prevent them, as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism wrongly assumed, from choosing employers based upon wage. 

The ultimate goal of the global capitalist elite is an entirely private state where law enforcement, courts, defence and intelligence are provided for-profit in competitive markets where the ruling classes can coerce the masses more perfectly. It also means that rulers gain their wealth by means considered “ethical” by capitalist apologists — selling goods or services. This is exactly how the Gulf monarchies gain revenue with zero taxation of capital or land, and limited taxation even of labour. Critics have noted this would mean the rich can access extremely expensive and elaborate services, whilst those without money lack access to these services at all, which would make the poor either:

1. even more vulnerable to exploitation by the super-rich, or
2. totally dependent on the super-rich and forbidden from criticising them

Any such system would undoubtedly be exceptionally oppressive for an immense majority, who would lose the most basic freedoms.

4. Imperialism Comes from Resource Scarcity

It is typically assumed that Western Europe’s incentive to seek colonies in the tropics and North America resulted from that region’s extreme scarcity of land and mineral resources — in turn due to:

1. intensive and repeated Quaternary glaciation producing soils of geologically vanishingly rare fertility
2. highly dense rural populations supported by those soils and a highly favourable climate for agriculture
3. extreme poverty in metallic minerals, which the glaciers largely destroyed

It is typically argued that natural-resource-poor countries are not worth colonizing, for instance Irma Adelman and Nobuhiko Fuwa in ‘Income Inequality and Development. The 1970s and 1980s Compared’. Except where natural-resource-poor lands possess strategic value, this was true for colonisation by Western Europe. This explains why some of the world’s most natural-resource-poor countries, for example Japan and Nepal, were never colonised.

However, if an imperialist country is labour-poor, it will want primarily to control labour-rich countries. Nevertheless, direct colonial rule is improbable because backward, labour-rich countries that have not experienced revolutions led by workers or landless peasants will inevitably possess indigenous ruling classes too weak to act independently of the ruling classes of the advanced, land-rich nations, and too fearful of potential political threats from their lower classes under expanding trade to avoid such alliances. This relationship, it must be emphasised, is colonialism and is imperialism. The advanced, land-rich societies exploit abundant labour, pay this labour vastly less than its productivity, and dictate the politics of the source nations. Although significant local income sources, remittances from the Gulf, North America, Russia, Kazakhstan and Australia are very small vis-à-vis corporate profits.

Similarly, foreign aid emerged with the transfer of global power to the land-rich US and USSR. Aid can be understood as a means of maintaining friendly regimes and consequently access to abundant labour. As Gilens and Page noted in Affluence and Influence, mass interest groups have zero independent political influence even in the purportedly democratic US; however, loss of access to the abundant labour of humid Eurasia would likely empower these mass interest groups radically and rapidly. In other countries rich in both capital and land, loss of this access would likely produce much more violent mass [citizen] rebellions, although, because so many of these societies are so specialised that they do not engage in manufacturing at all, democratisation even under these conditions remains uncertain.

Conclusion

Whilst it is not perfectly easy to ascertain the effects of the absence versus existence of economies rich in both capital and land, it does appear to me that there is a substantial difference in the geopolitical results under these two scenarios. Popular conceptions of politics can be inverted in advanced, land-rich societies where the already-powerful are rebelling against any constraints upon their power — seen today in skyrocketing inequality and runaway climate change impossible to counter because doing so ipso facto depletes the wealth and limits the power of US corporations, Australian coal barons and Soviet and Gulf oil rulers,  who have built a complete geopolitical system precisely to eliminate threats thereto. The question of what conditions permit or prevent the existence of societies abundant in both capital and land is still more difficult and I will not claim to have a clear answer; nonetheless, the observed trajectory of pokitics today makes understanding these societies and the questions they raise more critical than in 1989 when Commerce and Coalitions appeared.

Wendell Berry's 6 favorite books about environmental protection

Although I have known of Wendell Berry, a controversial though admired farmer and writer from Kentucky’s Henry County, since the 1990s, it is only today when browsing through Front Porch Republic that I discovered this list titled “Wendell Berry's 6 favorite books about environmental protection: the poet and environmental activist recommends inspiring works about how to interact with the land”.

1. Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan by F. H. King
2. Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith 
3. An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard
4. A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
5. Home Place: Essays on Ecology by Stan Rowe
6. Nature as Measure: The Selected Essays of Wes Jackson

I find some of the choices especially revealing in a world where the free market directs agriculture to the very countries possessing the oldest, most leached, and most infertile soils alongside the scarcest and most unreliable water resources. As early as 2008 James Kenneth Galbraith in his The Predatory State hinted at the problems posed by specialising in agriculture, although without any consideration of the disadvantages specialisers in agriculture actually have relative to countries with immense comparative disadvantage in agriculture.

The first book on the list, published in 1929 before the “Green Revolution” intensified the Enriched World’s comparative disadvantage in agriculture, illustrates how it is possible to sustain agriculture in favourable climates and young soils. The second illustrates why annual crops are ill-suited outside the Enriched World except in certain Tropical World regions of unusually fertile soils that share the Enriched World’s general agricultural comparative disadvantage. The third, fifth and sixth books appear less interesting, whilst A Sand County Almanac is a familiar American environmental classic which I have never read.

All in all, these books do illustrate the way in which intensive farming was sustained in the Enriched World, which has bene the success of the localist and organic farming movements. Their failure has been to not recognise the ipso facto unsustainability of farming many regions – all of Australia and many parts of Africa, tropical Asia and non-Hispanophone South America – and to campaign for appropriate land uses in these regions. Without appropriate land use and new economies in these regions of almost universal extreme comparative advantage in agriculture, we cannot solve the global ecological crisis.

Why a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation should be Australia’s goal

Tonight, when I was having dinner with my brother and mother, my brother made a stern criticism of my talk about Australia’s sorry greenhouse gas emissions record, revealed by this table from the Climate Change Performance Index. Baḥrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Turkmenistan are major omissions owing to their very high per capita emissions, but the table is still useful even with them omitted and many countries with low total and per capita emissions included.

The position of Australia at the absolute bottom of this list must constitute utter shame for every Australian. Writers like Tim Flannery, Thomas Aquinas McMahon, and Gordon Orians and Antoni Milewski have shown that Australia’s ecology is:

1. shaped by soils that – at least amongst Quaternary landmasses – are uniquely ancient, weathered, nutrient-poor and vulnerable to erosion
1. the unique vulnerability to erosion is caused by extreme texture contrasts
2. these in turn are caused by clay accumulation in deep subsoil after 300 million or more years of topsoil leaching
3. most of this leaching occurred in much wetter and hotter climates than found in the Quaternary
2. demanding of extremely low energy consumption by native fauna, and extremely low nutrient requirements for native flora
3. demanding of extremely large territories for native fauna due to the extremely low density of nutritious food and the absence of nutrients that allow effective digestion of cellulose
4. in the case of aquatic organisms, shaped by uniquely high variability in runoff due to extremely low runoff coefficients and absence of baseflow where it is found in similar climates elsewhere
1. this is due to much greater absorption of water by native vegetation compared to similar climates elsewhere on the globe
2. in turn this high water absorption and low runoff component of moisture budgets is due to the need for deep, dense roots to absorb nutrients from ancient soils

These features, especially (2) demand that Australia have by far the world’s lowest per capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, not excluding the poorest tropical African nations. They also demand logically that Australia be ranked as incomparably the world’s best country in terms of climate change performance. Both of these stand exactly opposed to Australia’s uniquely bad and worsening performance over the past three decades. An acceptable performance – even factoring in that many of the highest-performing countries could reasonably have been omitted – would have required Australia completely decarbonise so early as 2005.

Following on from groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation, and the Democratic Socialist Party, I have long assumed that by expropriating the wealth and profits of Australia’s major corporate greenhouse emitters, rapid and total decarbonisation of Australia would prove easy to plan and execute, chiefly by transferring from cars and coal to renewable energy and electric mass transit, complete cessation of land clearing, and large-scale revegetation of degraded farmland with native flora.

However, this evening, my brother said I had severely neglected the impact of the meat industry, and said I did so because I enjoy eating meat despite its major impacts via greenhouse gas emissions and using Australia’s uniquely scarce water resources. Consider that the volume of water carried by all mainland Australian rivers south of the Tropic of Capricorn – draining around four and a half million square kilometres – is only four-fifths that carried by the Kaladan, a river draining an area half the size of Tasmania.

I have long held that the environmental impacts of food grown abroad are negligible vis-à-vis analogous food grown in Australia because:

1. water resources overseas average around fifteen times as intense per unit area as the water resources of Australia south of the Tropic of Capricorn
2. required storage sizes for the same total draft in the same climate in Australia are (approximately) 7.3 times as large as for Europe, East Asia, the Americas or New Zealand
1. in fact, because of Australia’s high evaporation rates during dry spells due to advection of dry air from the interior, the figure of 7.3 times larger is most definitely an understatement
3. soils in the Enriched World (extratropical northern and western hemispheres) and the younger parts of the Tropical World are almost all under 10,000 years old and are rapidly replaced when eroded or damaged by new soil
4. in contrast, the topsoil of Australia was mostly formed over 300,000,000 years ago during the Carboniferous and is not replaced if eroded or damaged: instead, the landscape is permanently denuded, gullied and/or salinised
5. Australia’s oceans have – according to on old atlas that I was given by one of my father’s sisters – less than one-tenth the animal plankton density of seas in the same latitudes of Europe, East Asia, or the Americas
6. the requirements of Australian soils for the nutrient elements in which they are severely deficient compared to all other present-day landmasses can produce ecologically dangerous eutrophication during large floods, and also make land unsuitable for native flora and fauna
7. Australia’s native trees are extremely efficient at storing carbon in the absence of large-scale bushfires, vis-à-vis shorter-lived and more easily browsed Enriched and Tropical World trees
8. climate change has already substantially aridified Australia’s major agricultural areas, and as it further does so, larger areas of sub-marginal land of high conservation value might be cleared
1. ironically, this last point is most likely to be an issue if global warming makes present conservations reserves unsuitable for the species they were proclaimed to protect

These differences are much more severe for animal foods (including fish) than for annual plant foods, and much more for annual plant foods than for perennial plant foods. Contrary to the implicit attitude of many vegetarians, non-meat animal foods are equally or more unsustainable in the Australian environment as meat itself. Milk production uses more water and nutrients than meat, and fish is so unsustainable in Australia’s warm, oligotrophic oceans that many Aboriginal groups developed absolute taboos against fish eating, but not against meat. Australia is indeed so nutrient-poor that any population density above 0.1 people per square kilometre cannot be ecologically sustained by local nutrient resources unless the diet be de jure and de facto vegan. This means no animal foods would be eaten whatsoever and that law and/or custom also mandate no animal foods be eaten. The pre-industrial human history of Australia (see here), however, reflects that a vegan diet based on local resources would be impossibly poor nutritionally.

Contrariwise, in the Enriched World production of animal foods has exceedingly small comparative impact, so veganism becomes of itself a form of consumerism that helps divert food production into more fragile lands.

The only real argument against a fully imported food supply and complete revegetation of Australia is transport energy costs. Whilst these must not be dismissed, I have generally thought that with major improvements to fuel efficiency of ocean and rail transport, and even of intercontinental air transport, these problems could certainly be overcome to a substantial degree, and that even if they were not entirely overcome the gains in terms of conservation of Australia’s land and elimination of emissions from land clearing would make it justifiable.

The complete protection of Australia’s ancient soils and uniquely structured ecosystems would give a completely new and much truer image of Australia to outsides – an image of a continent whose ecological and even climatic structure is much closer to (if not perfectly representative of) the Earth during its predominant geological history as an ice-free oligotrophic planet. This history is not known to most of the world’s population, and is not well-understood even by ecologists, but that it needs to be known there is no doubt.

Blind spots in the Trotskyist worldview

Ever since the painful and frustrating COVID-19 pandemic began affecting Victoria in March, I have read the Trotskyist websites World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and Red Flag (the descendant of Socialist Alternative whose archives can be found here) as a response to frustration and hoping for a radical solution to the COVID-19 crisis that:

1. would avoid any risk of the recurrence that is occurring in Melbourne as I write this and
2. would not be too slow

I have extreme fear that lockdowns – on and off – will persist in Victoria well into 2021 and possibly into 2022 or 2023, whilst the rest of Australia has fully opened up and contained COVID-19 by the end of this year or earlier.

Revelation today that major quarantine breaches have been the major contributing factor to the explosive growth of COVID-19 in Victoria since 17 June has made me imagine that a “genuine socialist” society – as defined by Socialist Alternative and the WSWS – would avoid the mistakes that my mother has said are inevitable. By eliminating the profit motive more care would be taken to ensure no COVID-19 escapes from quarantine, rather than sacrificing care to reduce costs. Moreover, I have emphasised a major factor in why COVID-19, but not Ebola or swine flu, caused a major pandemic is that there is zero quarantine for travellers exiting tropical and East Asia, but strict quarantine for those exiting Latin America. This despite tropical and East Asia being more nutrient-rich and favourable for microbial development than Africa or eastern South America (although Mesoamerica and Andean South America are more nutrient-rich than tropical Asia).

The remarkable thing is that Trotskyist groups never think of quarantine as a good thing at all. They view it as merely a product of capitalism, which they define as exploitation of workers for profit. Much more importantly, Trotskyists view quarantine as a product of nation-states, which they believe are a weapon of capitalist class rule to divide the workers by nation, thus preventing a rapid international revolution to overthrow global capitalism. The fact is that, even if the majority of political divisions are artificial, there does exist extremely distinct ecological regions of the world, as I have outlined in many older posts on this blog.

Trotskyists’ COVID-19 policy consists of a rigid cessation of all nonessential industries with zero loss of pay until a vaccine is found. The World Socialist Web Site have claimed that a vaccine would be found in one month if every single cent of the wealth and profits of the richest 1 percent – or even of the richest 0.01 percent – was expropriated and diverted to urgent medical research. Trotskyists also believe that if land clearing in the tropics were eliminated, large-scale pandemics would be too, although they lack understanding of why it is only the Tropical World where land-clearing has such disastrous effects.

No actual scientist believes that a vaccine could possibly be found in one month even with the total expropriation advocated by the Trotskyists.The human body does not function in such a manner that testing of vaccines can be done perfectly within such a short time. Side-effects of vaccines and of drugs can take several months to develop. The Trotskyists undoubtedly believe that:

1. new electronic medical technology would permit extremely rapid developments of perfectly safe and effective drugs and vaccines
2. such would be possible if every last cent of the profits and wealth of the richest 1 percent or 0.01 percent were expropriated and placed in the hands of the majority

However, their claims – as I recall them – seem to be what my brother calls marginally misleadingly (because Trotskyists are insistent that human work and constant struggle against the capitalists is the key to achieving the immense benefits of workers’ rather than bosses’ control) “magic solutions”. By “magic solutions” is meant an idea or action that would solve every single problem in the world in a completely failsafe manner. In the case of COVID-19, the Trotskyist worldview goes ridiculously far, and has definite blind spots in their extreme internationalism failing to recognise natural ecological boundaries, and their belief that workers’ control can eliminate all social and economic problems immediately.

The WHO’s blind spot

In recent days with the threat of a complete lockdown in Australia, and already being extremely angry at the potential loss of public transport which I so love, as well as not being able to go to public libraries, there is one thing I have realised.

That is that the World Health Organization – who declared COVID-19 a pandemic eight days ago – has a major blind spot about the quarantine of international travellers.

Have a look at the final question on this extremely familiar (to me) Australian incoming passenger card:

Australian incoming passenger card. Note that there is no question about visiting South or East Asia, although that region’s ecology is more suitable to microbe growth than Africa or eastern South America

The question reads:

“Were you in Africa, South/Central America or the Caribbean in the last 6 days?”

The reason for this requirement is to exclude dangerous infectious diseases – mainly yellow fever – from Australia. Tropical Asia has never had yellow fever, which originated in prehistoric times from African monkeys and spread with slavery to tropical Latin America. Yellow fever was the first virus to be isolated – even before the invention of the electron microscope – and for this reason tropical Asia, even at much lower levels of development than today, successfully quarantined it.

Nonetheless, as Anthony Mills and Antoni Milewski showed in their ‘Does Life Consistently Maximise Energy Intensity’ – which celebrates its tenth anniversary this month – the most favourable environment for microbes is one with an abundance of catabolic nutrients. Catabolic nutrients are almost always chalcophile elements, which form covalent bonds with less electronegative nonmetals like carbon, phosphorus and sulfur. Because they are highly volatile and form dense sulfide minerals, chalcophile elements are, on Earth, bidirectionally depleted from the crust. They are depleted both by:

1. core formation which is estimated to take up 99 percent of the dense chalcophile minerals
2. evaporation into and from the atmosphere which loses the volatile chalcophiles to space

Within the crust chalcophile elements are intensely concentrated at plate boundaries where they can be uplifted from greater depths. Consequently, they are highly enriched in areas of high mountains, excluding mountains built from acidic igneous rocks, and further depleted on old tropical cratons.

If we follow Mills and Milewski’s criteria and add the requirement of hot or warm temperatures for microbial growth, tropical Asia, alongside Mesoamerica and Andean South America, becomes more favourable for microbial growth than less eutrophic Africa or non-Hispanophone South America. The humid subtropics of Asia and especially the hypereutrophic Pampas of South America also stand out as highly favourable for microbes.

Thus, even if yellow fever and other endemic infectious diseases are absent from tropical Asia, what COVID-19, and even SARS, does demonstrate is the need for quarantine of travellers exiting tropical and East Asia equal to that for those exiting Africa and Latin America. If travellers had been so quarantined when COVID-19 broke out, it would not have spread into communities outside China.

A final proof the “March on Canberra” is a quarter-century and counting overdue

According to a new paper in the journal Nature, regardless of what the rest of the world does, record-breaking temperature rises are already inevitable until 2040.

At the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald is noting a zero-emissions plan for Britain – whose parity emissions per capita are minimally four times those of Australia – as Australia approves the polluting Adani coal mine. There is – and was even before last month’s surprise election – a certainty Australia will expand fossil fuels whilst the EU moves to zero-net-emissions.

Many (including my brother) naïvely believe that Australia will eventually be condemned as a pariah state for expanding fossil fuels. Nevertheless, this viewpoint overlooks demographic reality. Australia already has substantially higher total fertility than those nations most advanced in decarbonisation. Recent trends towards lowest-low fertility in Finland (from 1.9 to 1.5 children since 2010) and other European nations whose fertility was the least low during the 2000s suggests that Morrison’s policies will widen this gap.

The fact is that – as I have emphasised for two decades – Australia must ecologically have by far the lowest emissions per capita in the world. This demand places human energy consumption upon its natural biological “footing”. Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated three decades ago that the money existed to finance a rapid transition to a carbon-free Australia as early as 2005 or 2010 – were major polluters taxed severely enough.

As Dimitri Lafleur has partially shown, a carbon-free Australia would remake the world economy by:

1. radically limiting energy and materials use on a global scale, especially in desert nations with naturally low-energy ecologies and zero hydropower potential
2. shifting “developing” economies towards renewable energy once they do not have cheap fossil fuels from Australia and the oil states
3. shifting energy-intensive industries towards those (Enriched and Tropical) nations with large resources in hydropower
4. shifting agriculture towards the high-latitude nations with youngest and most fertile soils
1. this would occur because land clearing is a major source (around 20 percent) of greenhouse emissions in Australia
2. also, Australian soils are thirty thousand times older and more weathered than soils of most other Quaternary landmasses
3. young, high-latitude areas are also least affected by runaway climate change shown as certain by Nature
5. shifting away from planned obsolescence towards long-lasting consumer goods that use fewer resources over the long term

What needed to be done back in the 1990s was for the globe to recognise that – regardless of its relatively small aggregate emissions that have led even environmentalists to neglect it – a rigid, zero-compromise, zero-emissions target for Australia no later than 2010 would have:

1. largely solved global greenhouse gas emissions by radically altering global development patterns
2. paid for the ecological crisis out of the pockets of those people – alongside the Arab Gulf royal families – with greatest duty and ability to pay
3. achieved this in a manner in agreement with Earth’s natural ecology (smallest per-capita energy consumption and emissions in arid desert nations)
4. in an Enriched World then and now crippled by excessive environmental regulations, which stand likely to achieve negligible global gains while Australia mines and uses more and more coal, created major economic opportunities including:
• phase-out of economically crippling Enriched World farm subsidies as Australia’s unsustainable pastoral and broad-acre farmland would be converted to ecotourism
• revitalising such industries as aluminum and titanium smelting when coal use in phased out in Australia and other nations lacking hydropower potential

Given the experiences of the past quarter-century and especially last month’s election, there exists zero possibility that Australia will ever elect a more environmentally responsive government. Thus, other countries are burdened with the critical task of clamping down on the worst environmental performer – a task entirely ignored but unless achieved even a total carbon phase-out in the EU and East Asia will achieve little in the long term.

Instead of decentralised global environmental protests (as seen in recent weeks) what was needed in 1994 and stands three decades overdue was and is a global focus upon the centre of power in the worst environmental performer: protests demanding uncompromising, rapid decarbonisation of Australia, or a “March on Canberra”. Whilst the effects would not be immediate, would be costly to the rest of the world and would need to be sustained over years and even decades, they possess potential to actually deal with the planet’s worst polluter rather than permit Australia indefinite emissions increases negating large-scale decarbonisation abroad.

Plotting actual versus parity per capita greenhouse gas emissions

In recent posts about the failures of the Kyōtō Protocol, I have expressed extreme anger that:

1. the highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters – excluding a few remote small tropical islands – are desert states whose natural ecologies are based on extreme limitation of energy consumption
2. excepting Least Developed Countries (LDCs) there appears to be an anticorrelation between actual per capita emissions and the relative per capita energy consumption allowed by ecology
3. (1) and (2) are poorly noted by either ecologists or climatologists
• even Tim Flannery, who would be expected to be the most aware person in the world of this, seldom makes the connection so explicit as it should be made

In order to have a reasonable look at the actual situation, I have plotted a graph of actual per capita emissions against those which I believe reflect relative ecological parity of each nation (for methodology see below):

2013 per capita emissions versus relative ecological parity emissions. The actual Pearson correlation coefficient is +0.06

Being aware that very poor Least Developed Countries would distort any observable anticorrelation, I did another experiment without the Least Developed Countries, but Least Developed Countries actually had less effect on the result than I expected. However, when I included only the upper-middle and upper-income countries, I did find a very clear negative correlation between actual and ecological parity per capita emissions:

2013 per capita emissions versus relative ecological parity emissions for upper-middle and upper-income countries. The Pearson correlation coefficient is -0.27

This observed anticorrelation does suggest that in the Enriched World there exist inherent political or resource limitations to the growth of per capita greenhouse emissions that are absent from the arid subtropics of the Eastern Hemisphere or from the humid tropics (e.g. Årts and Janssen, 2006, Cornwallis et. al, 2017). In resource-exporting nations, extremely high energy consumption by the ruling classes is actively supported by suburban citizens who gain a low-tax, high-energy lifestyle based around large, comfortable cars. This is one reason for the exceedingly high emissions of Australia and the Gulf States. In the Enriched World ruling classes lack such cheap energy, while demands by lower classes for redistribution are much stronger. This serves to limit per capita energy consumption to a level frequently exceeded in the resource-richest nations.

Such an anticorrelation is wholly untenable and ignorance thereof a significant problem. It also suggests development in historically poor tropical and desert nations as fraught with severe danger for the planet’s climate.

Methodology for Parity Emissions:

1. Each point of land was aligned to one of the ecoregions outlined in the second Kyōtō Protocol post
1. high mountain regions of the tropics – if wet enough to qualify as humid under the Köppen classification – had the same weighted emissions as the Enriched World
2. in the cases of New Zealand (Milewski, personal communication) and the Iberian Peninsula and southern Mediterranean (McMahon and Finlayson, 1991), ecological peculiarities allowed me to lower the parity emissions from 3 to 2.75
2. For each country, the weighted geometric mean of the parity regions for each point of land was assigned as its parity emissions
3. To make the graph, these parity emissions were graphed on the x-axis against actual emissions from 2013 (World Resources Institute, 2014)

References:

• Cornwallis, Charlie K.; Botero, Carlos A.; Rubenstein, Dustin R.; Downing, Philip A.; West, Stuart A. and Griffin, Ashleigh S.; ‘Cooperation facilitates the colonization of harsh environments’; Nature, Ecology and Evolution, vol. 1 (2017) article 0057
• Flannery, Tim F.; The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People; ISBN 0730104222
• Lovegrove, Barry G.; ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’; The American Naturalist, vol. 156, no. 2 (August 2000), pp. 201-218
• McMahon, T.A. and Finlayson, B.L.; Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges. ISBN 3-923381-27-1
• World Resources Institute; ‘Climate Analysis Indicators Tool (CAIT) Version 2.0. (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2014)’
• Årts, Paul and Janssen, Dennis; ‘Shades of Opinion: The Oil Exporting Countries and International Climate Politics’; The Review of International Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2003, pp. 332-351

Ecologically requisite Kyōtō targets and plans – a summary

These were the “annexes” required for ecological parity at the Earth’s first global warming protocol at Kyōtō in 1996. Note absence of correlation between requisite emissions reductions and membership in Annex 1

In my previous two posts (here and here) I demonstrated that ecological parity at Kyōtō required emissions reductions from a bloc of nations almost completely exclusive – with the paramount exception of Australia – of those “Annex 1” nations committed to emissions limitations by the actual Protocol.This post will basically tabulate each bloc shown on the above map, and then look at means by which this ecologically just plan could have been carried out – the key prerequisite being greater participation and unity amongst nations with below-parity per capita emissions.

Bloc	Nations	Requisite Kyōtō emissions reduction by 2010	Key issues	Policy measures required
“Annex AAA”	Australia	90 percent to 95 percent	Extremely high per capita emissions combined with low-energy ecology Essential source of fossil fuels for industrial emissions in rest of world High solar energy potential via extremely high sunshine Limited potential for other renewable energy – no reliable hydropower and only a few tidal or geothermal sources Complete political control by corporations with vested interest in unlimited emissions (Hamilton, 2006) Low taxes creates inability to pay high overheads for renewable energy and high-speed public transit	Extreme emissions reductions required to match ecology Resource elites gain tremendous political power from unlimited emissions, and dictate rigid greenhouse-sceptic policies Absence of compromise by rest of world essential Only potential compromise removing coal subsidies to mollify key wealthy oil producers whose absence doomed actual Protocol Australian fossil fuel subsidies per capita more than seven times those of the US (Whitley, 2013, p. 9) Elimination of fossil fuel subsidies a critical part of Kyōtō’s failure (Asmelash, 2016) Large-scale pre-emptive revegetation in Australia necessary because much farmland threatened by elimination of former winter rainfall
	New Caledonia
	Gulf Cooperation Council
	North African OPEC
“Annex AA”	Non-Arab OPEC (excluding low-emissions Nigeria)	30 percent to 90 percent	Most “Annex AA” possessed strong opportunities to meet reductions by eliminating and reversing land clearing Significant source of fossil fuels for emissions in Enriched World	Land clearing needed to be counted, but strict demands for its cessation (plus in many areas revegetation) critical Demand for immediate elimination of all fossil fuel subsidies in 1996 could have significantly reduced emissions (Asmelash, 2016; Koplow, 2014)
“Annex A”	Southern Africa	30 percent to 50 percent	Mineral exporters with high per capita emissions (in PNG due solely to land clearing) Eliminating land clearing gives major opportunities to reduce emissions Very high biodiversity value due to ancient rainforest and Southern African ecosystems	Land clearing needed to be counted, but strict demands for its cessation (plus in many areas revegetation) critical
	Malaysia
	Papua New Guinea
“Annex E”	United States, Canada and New Zealand	15 percent to 45 percent	Higher per capita emissions than other Enriched nations, so above ecological parity Elevated emissions due to a combination of: relatively low population densities abundant fossil fuel reserves (except New Zealand) poor public transport (Marriott and Mortimore, 2017) United ecologically by cold steppe and mountainous west-coast ecosystems	Concessions necessary to prevent siding with “Annex AAA” nations as actually happened Excepting New Zealand, severe reductions in “Annex AAA” emissions might not cut local emissions Whether inclusion of some “developing” nations and exclusion of most “developed” nations would mollify US not clear Need to recognise commonalities in ecology with below-parity Enriched and Tropical nations rather than “Annex AAA”
	Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Turkmenistan
China		0 percent (cap)	Definite ecological ties to “Annex E” as shares large areas of cold steppe Per capita emissions 11 percent of Australia’s in 1996, but above global average from 2007 Accounted for 26 percent of total global emissions by 2014 Industrial development the major source of Australian economic growth in Howard era Potential for large emissions growth evident during 1990s Emissions growth averaged 6.7 percent annually between 2000 and 2015	In actual Kyōtō Protocol aligned with “Annex E” and powerful “Annex AAA” nations to thwart serious emissions reductions Despite modest pre-1995 per capita emissions, possessed powerful economic interest in unrestricted emissions owing to: largest human population in world (twenty percent of total) abundant natural resources potential as global superpower Absence of an emissions cap major cause of global emissions increase since Kyōtō
Remaining below-ecological-parity nations		∞ (no targets or caps)	Large reductions in “Annex AAA” emissions would almost certainly limit local emissions Many economic opportunities if “Annex AAA” required to pay for its own pollution (e.g. hydropower and other renewable energy)	Critical need to ally based upon common interest in low emissions and upon existing below-ecological-parity emissions Need to demonstrate to “Annex AAA”, “Annex AA” and “Annex A” the effect of their large emissions as not being paid for by the emitters Need to demonstrate to the public that even high-income nations in this group required no targets and until severe and deep emissions reductions achieved by “Annex AAA” nations Must demand that “Annex AAA” nations pay doubly for the cost of climate change in these nations (Sunnstein, 2007)

Marriott and Mortimore (2017) demonstrate that “Annex AAA” nations currently constitute environmental tax havens with extremely cheap energy plus poor emissions and efficiency standards – policies that undo gains elsewhere. It has always seemed logical to me that if there be no tightening (or indeed a loosening) of emissions regulations in “Annex AAA” nations and severe tightening or moves towards a carbon-free economy elsewhere, then polluters will simply relocate all operations to “Annex AAA” countries. I argued this in a letter to The Age whilst Tony Abbott was removing Australia’s carbon tax, and this possibility being never publicly mentioned nor analysed or even considered by peer-reviewed journals does not make it implausible.

Australia already has a major fertility advantage over the EU, East Asia and New Zealand, which must translate into greater long-term geopolitical power. Ever-widening disparities in environmental standards and taxes will almost certainly exacerbate an already topsy-turvy situation. Movement of manufacturing jobs from a carbon-free Eurasia to an unregulated Australia could potentially reproduce baby boom-era fertility (over 3 children per woman) in Australia simultaneous with lowest-low or even lower (under 1 child per woman) in Europe, extratropical Asia, the Americas and New Zealand.

My relatives frequently argue that absence of reductions by extreme per capita emitters is insignificant re global climate change because “Annex AAA” aggregate emissions are small. This is fallacious, even when ignoring questions of ecology and environmental justice (Najam et. al, 2003; Althor et. al., 2015), which demand these nations cut per capita emissions to far below the global average. The root reason why no large-scale global emissions reductions have occurred is that the major contributors – the fossil fuel and lithophile metal corporations of Australia and the Arab oil states – are the most powerful corporations in a globalised world but must be entirely dismantled to cut emissions.

This is a much more unfavorable situation than envisioned in Sunnstein (2007, pp. 1678-1684) because to mitigate global warming these corporations and royalties must necessarily surrender extremely concentrated political power and financial wealth.

References:

• Abate, Randall S.; ‘Public Nuisance Suits for the Climate Justice Movement: The Right Thing and the Right Time’; Washington Law Review, vol. 85 (2010), pp. 197-250
• Althor, Glenn; Watson, James E.M. and Fuller, Richard A.; ‘Global mismatch between greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of climate change’; Scientific Reports 6, 20281 (2016)
• Asmelash, Henok Birhanu; ‘Falling oil prices and sustainable energy transition: Towards a multilateral agreement on fossil-fuel subsidies’; WIDER Working Paper 2016/13
• Hamilton, Clive; ‘The Dirty Politics of Climate Change’; Speech to the Climate Change and Business Conference Hilton Hotel, Adelaide, 20 February 2006 (published as .pdf)
• Koplow, Doug; Defining and Measuring Fossil Fuel Subsidies; in Skovgård, Jakob (editor); The Politics of Fossil Fuel Subsidies and their Reform, ISBN 9781108241946
• Marriott, Lisa and Mortimore, Anna; ‘Emissions, Road Transport, Regulation and Tax Incentives in Australia and New Zealand’; Journal of the Australasian Tax Teachers Association, vol. 12, no. 1 (2017), pp. 23-52
• Najam, Adil, Saleem-ul-Huq and Sokona, Youba; ‘Climate negotiations beyond Kyōtō: Developing countries’ concerns and interests’; Climate Policy 3(3) (September 2003), pp. 221-231
• Sunnstein, Cass R.; ‘The World vs. the United States and China – The Complex Climate Change Incentives of the Leading Greenhouse Gas Emitters’; University of California at Los Angeles Law Review (2007), pp. 1675-1700
• Whitley, Shelagh; ‘At cross-purposes: subsidies and climate-compatible investment’ (thesis); published April 2013 by Overseas Development Institute (UKAid)