A “famous” typo recalled — and Trump beating it

2019 Melbourne rainfall to today. With nothing forecast Melbourne seems very likely to not merely receive less than the city’s existing record low (332.3 millimetres), but receive less than the existing Victorian record low calendar-year total

Victoria’s record low annual rainfall up to 2018 — almost certain to be beaten by a substantial portion of the state in 2019 — from Kyndalyn Park (latitude 34.71° S, longitude 142.93° E)

In recent days with only 43 millimetres of rain in Melbourne for 2019 and a probable record dry year by a factor of four or more — likely Melbourne will beat even Kyndalyn Park’s 1967 state record low rainfall of 75.9 millimetres — I have gleefully recalled a personally famous typo from Perth’s Sunday Times on 27 April, 2008:

What you're paying

Unleaded petrol prices in Brisbane and on the southern Queensland coast today hit $1.46 a litre, according to petrol price monitoring website Motor Mouth.

But unleaded fuel was available at some northern Brisbane outlets for as little as $1.30. Prices on the Gold and Sunshine coasts have also reached $1.46, but some fuel could be found for up to 15 cents a litre less, according to petrol price monitoring website, MotorMouth. Queensland has an eight cents a litre petrol subsidy.

Unleaded prices in Adelaide are nearing $1.55 a litre. Sydney prices range from $1.47 to $1.55 a litre. Melbourne drivers are paying up to $153.90 a litre, while Perth motorists are faring better at $1.40 a litre.”

Seeing this text, nobody would miss the typo. The typist writing for the Sunday Times obviously meant to write

153.90¢ a litre,

which the news.com.au system apparently automatically would change to $1.54 a litre, whilst automatically changing 153.90$ a litre to $153.90 a litre.

Rather than ignoring the typo, I — who has long known Australian petrol as untenably cheap — saw it as one typo I wished were true. Such increased fuel prices would — even with much less fuel sold — give Australia’s governments funding for neglected environmental projects like:

1. complete closure of coal-fired power stations
2. a large-scale renewable energy plan and budget to decarbonise the whole continent
3. a nationwide high-speed rail network to reduce pressure on Tullamarine and Kingsford-Smith Airports
4. public transport networks in all major cities and their surrounding semi-rural districts surpassing the world’s best extant networks
5. complete revegetation of southern Australian farmland certain to be aridified by the rapid poleward widening of the subtropical arid belt

When I told Mummy about the Sunday Times typo a day ago, I was told that Donald Trump has made a much worse blunder when discussing a major Sri Lanka attack on Easter Sunday, whereby eight bombs exploded in churches and hotels. I will quote Trump:

Heartfelt condolences from the people of the United States to the people of Sri Lanka on the horrible terrorist attacks on churches and hotels that have killed at least 138 million people and badly injured 600 more. We stand ready to help!

My mother has always been extreemly critical of President Trump, seeing him as a racist, sexist populist appealing to the emotions of white rural Americans who feel left out with modern technological changes. Mummy, who knew the 2008 typo and my admittedly emotional response to it, said that Trump “surpassed” the Perth newspaper’s typo by a thousand if I recall correctly. Actually, Trump’s error surpassed the 2008 typo by ten thousand. Some of his critics believe Trump magnified the death toll intentionally, presumably to make Americans more scared of Muslims.

However, one difference exists that stands far more critical than the magnitude of the errors. There would exist major benefits to Earth’s ecology, frequently discussed on this blog, from less cheap Australian petrol. There would exist no benefits to anybody or anything from terrorists achieving a death toll corresponding to a nuclear mini-holocaust. If it were true that terrorists could murder on the scale President Trump claimed, there would be the danger of terrorism killing entire civilisations.

Changed policies, changed system, same power centre

A year ago today – though I forgot – I read an article from the West Australian dating back to 1980, the year of the appalling Lonie Report whose effects will be seen this week in record hot October temperatures.

In my early 2000s university classes, it was taught that Australia only became a dreadful laggard on environmental issues with the demise of the Hawke Government following swings against Labor in Victoria with the 1990 Federal election. This has been outlined much more recently by the magazine Chain Reaction in Maria Taylor’s Global warming and climate change: What Australians knew and buried ... then framed a new reality for the public (available for free download here).

In some respects Australia’s environmental policies during the 1980s did not stand out so badly as they did in the 1990s and beyond – for instance we possessed much tougher pollution legislations than the UK and New Zealand.

Australia’s lesser laggardness in the 1980s is enhanced by the fact that many seminal environmental papers showing the continent’s unique ecology had not yet been published. None of The Future Eaters, Tom McMahon’s studies of global runoff (Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges) plus Barry Lovegrove’s study ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’, which reveals the exceptionally slow metabolism of Australia’s largest native mammals compared to large mammals elsewhere (though a search failed to find the supplementary material I was looking for), were published before 1990.

However, this article by later Age journalist Tim Colebatch, titled ‘Japan Cleans Air, Cleans Up Myths’, suggests – as the incidence of unnecessary road projects even before the Lonie Report made me suspect – that there was an extremely powerful lobby eliminating the ability of Australia to be anything but a laggard in environmental policy.

Colebatch shows that in 1980 Australia’s car industry was rigidly opposed to legislation to move Australia’s pollution standards closer to the strictest standards of Japan and California, despite the fact that motor cars were clearly the cause not only of a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions but also of toxic pollutants like nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. Given that Australian environments are much lower in volatile elements than the Enriched World, Australian native species likely have smaller tolerance for these toxic pollutants, and it thus stands logical that Australian environments required much cleaner air than those of Europe or Japan.

It is true that Colebatch ignore Australia’s lack of engineering skill compared to Japan or Germany – undoubtedly a direct result of Australia’s superabundant land and lithophile minerals which allow it to be very wealthy without these skills – and the potential influence of unions to slow adoption of new technologies. Nonetheless, Australia most likely had the skill to develop the technology to radically reduce both emissions and fuel consumption to a quarter of the long-term standard of approximately 11.5 litres per 100 kilometres (20.5 miles per US gallon). Greater fuel tax revenues and even the 57.5 percent import tariff then in use could have been used to permit the vast investment in rail transit that was overdue even in 1980, and import quotas could have been used to restrict car availability with improved public transport.

However, lobbying from car manufacturers and mortgage belt voters – who would struggle financially if petrol in Australia cost the environmental price of its use, which modern ecological knowledge suggests as minimally ten times present Australian fuel prices – would undoubtedly have made these radical changes politically suicidal.

The essential conclusion from ‘Japan Cleans Air, Cleans Up Myths’ is that Australia’s status as an embarrassing environmental laggard is much older than Maria Taylor presumes. In fact, Australia’s descent to such a woeful laggard became inevitable with demands for lower taxes and reduced regulation from the late 1980s. By 1987, it was clear our massively protected local car industry (protection in 1984 was equivalent to a 135 percent tariff) was economically unprofitable even with that protection. The powerful mining industries no doubt sensed potential increased profits with no import quotas and much lower car taxes. With the support of car-dependent and family-oriented mortgage belt voters on a uniquely abundant land supply, there was no way Australia’s politicians were clearly incapable of achieving even the very modest 20 percent reduction planned in 1990 – although that would have threatened the powers-that-be in the mineral, coal and road industries enough.

“New Deal Winters”

Tonight, as I have been working in the Bailleau trying to find out more about the notorious North American cold wave of winter 1935/1936 – a winter in which wind chill temperatures are supposed to have reached “100 below zero” or minus 73.3 degrees Celsius – I have discovered a strange article from the New York Times about the relationship between politics and winter temperatures.

The article, titled ‘New Deal Winters’, argued that with democratic administrations since the 1910s, winters over the US became colder, and with Republican administrations warmer. The basis of the argument is that the election of Warren Harding in 1921 saw a trend towards milder winters in the 1920s that was reversed from the anomalous winter of 1933/1934, when extreme cold hit the Northeast.

There are many troubles with this. The most obvious is that the trends shown are inapplicable globally and are indeed not applicable to most of the United States itself. The winter of 1928/1929 under Hoover was exceedingly cold over large areas of the United States, and – in spite of numerous records for warmth over the East – the winters of 1931/1932 and especially 1932/1933 were, especially the latter winter, which remains the coldest on record in Arizona very cold over the West.

The winter of 1933/1934 – one of the great “landmark” winters in the history of meteorology in North America – did see severe and costly cold in the Northeast and the Canadian Maritimes where apple crops were especially hard-hit – but in the West this winter was quite unprecedentedly mild. In fact, before Australian greenhouse gas emissions took control of global climate decisively in the 1970s and 1980s, the mild Western winter of 1933/1934 would have been a three standard deviation event, which would mean so mild a winter would have been expected to occur only once every seven hundred and forty years! The New York Times did briefly note that most of the contiguous US had experienced a warm winter in 1933/1934, but did not decisively point out just how warm that abnormal winter was.

It was so warm that many lakes in the Intermountain West failed to freeze for the only time since records have been kept – including in the modern era controlled by Australian greenhouse gas emissions. In Idaho, not only was the ski industry completely ruined by lack of snow, despite very heavy December precipitation, but during the spring of 1934 major pest outbreaks hit agriculture in the Inland Northwest with exceptional severity due to the absence of normal winterkill. The lack of water – it ran off during the winter with significant flooding observed in a very wet December – hit agriculture in the West hard during the hot, dry summer of 1934.

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1928/1929, during the Hoover regime, in the contiguous US. Note the uniform cold west of the Appalachians

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1932/1933 in the contiguous United States. Note the record cold over the Southwest and abnormal warmth (would certainly still be warmest minus Australian greenhouse emissions) over New England)

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1933/1934 in the contiguous US. The extraordinary warmth over the Inland Northwest is difficult to comprehend from this figure – it averaged over three virgin standard deviations above the mean.

It can be seen from these graphs that a trend to warm winters which had been observed to some extent during the 1920s persisted very firmly over the Mississippi Valley, but extremes were observed elsewhere and had been seen in the winter of 1930/1931, which remained the warmest on record in the Prairie Provinces of Canada and interior British Columbia until the “magic gate” of 1998.

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1930/1931 over the contiguous United States. This winter was – before the “magic gate” of 1998 – the warmest on record almost throughout Western Canada and is still the second-driest over the CONUS

What is funny to me about the “New Deal Winter” is the knowledge that if Australia had a respectable level of environmental regulation (crucially taking into account the exceptional age and infertility of its soils) climates over the globe would certainly be or become cooler than they have been over the past forty or so years.

This regulation would necessarily forbid or almost forbid any form of greenhouse pollution whatsoever being used in or produced by Australia, and would necessarily increase the effective size of government (government’s power to control the activities of business) far beyond what is observed in the Enriched World. Australia has never seen this type of “New Deal” because its hot climate and low secondary productivity supports hierarchism over the egalitarianism which, during the past century over the Enriched World, has produced and continues to produce radical political changes. When reading ‘New Deal Winters’, I love to relate seemingly significant global climate changes to such moves by Australian governments as:

1. the Lonie Report leading to large-scale building of freeways in Melbourne
2. the reduction and abolition of tariffs (began in 1988) that has gradually changed Australia’s car prices from the world’s dearest to its cheapest
3. the abolition of indexation of petrol excise in 2001 that has moved Australian fuel prices further down the global list

So the fact is that a “New Deal” in Australia with some serious greenhouse regulation and genuine taxation of highly polluting mineral corporations would rapidly have a major impact on global climate – but the real New Deal did not have the impacts the New York Times claimed during a freakishly harsh winter most probably driven by a highly negative North Atlantic Oscillation.

The hard truth about fuel excise

Although it is news to me that proposals to re-index fuel excise in Australia have been made and – remarkably due to the dilly-dallying of the Greens – failed, my discovery that evening has made me wish to look at how absurd in ecological terms Australia’s extremely low and declining (in real value) fuel excise is.

Although in the real world fuel excise pays for road upkeep and not environmental services, my opinion is that fuel excise is legitimate if and only if it pays for ecological services that a free market cannot, whether conservation reserves or mass transit projects. Thus a country’s legitimate level and quantity of fuel excise can be determined by the amount of land it needs conserved, but which a free market cannot protect from ecologically destructive development.

To determine the area of land requiring conservation, but un-conservable under a free market, one needs to subtract successively from a country’s land area:

1. land whose flora and fauna is younger than 15,000 years due to glaciation and hence completely lacks unique species or refuges therefor
2. land over the slope limit for efficient arable farming of 11 degrees
3. land which can support low-input agriculture – defined as agriculture without phosphatic and chalcophile element fertilisers or artificial river impoundments

(It is important that if a point of land meets more than one of those categories, it be counted only once).

If we follow those criteria, we find that Australia’s land almost never meets any of the three criteria that deem conservation unnecessary. The only soils in Australia capable of anything approaching “low-input” agriculture – the cracking clays of the Darling and Cooper basins within a crescent approximately from Singleton to Birdsville – are too heavy to plow without advanced machinery. Except its far southeast, this region also has much too erratic a rainfall for rainfed farming. Moreover, unlike other areas with similarly erratic rainfall in Central Chile or northwest India or California or the Brazilian sertão, it has no truly permanent water sources due to extremely high evaporation.

The proportion of Australia’s land under 11˚ slope, as can be seen here, is easily the highest of the world’s larger nations – in fact the proportion of land of very low slope that Australia has is exceptionally high and not exceeded even by small nation-states.

Thirdly, no more than 500 square kilometres of Australia (less than 0.001 percent) was glaciated during the Quaternary, whereas Canada and many European nations (approximately those north of a line from the Severn to the Rhine to the southern border of Poland to the Gulf of Anabar) were entirely glaciated for most of the Quaternary and have been habitable for only brief periods.

If we combine these three, we see that Australia has over seven million square kilometres (well over 90 percent of its land surface) needing conservation but not conservable in a free market. In contrast, all the other OECD nations combined possess only very small areas that fail all three tests above – highly leached land in the American South and a few sandplains in California, France and Portugal. These probably total not more than about ten thousand square kilometres or 0.1 percent the total area of “valuable but economically unconservable” land in Australia.

From this simple if unrefined and imperfectly measured logic, Australian fuel excise should by ecological criteria total well over ninety-nine percent the total fuel excise of all OECD nations, measured as a percent of the total fuel excise paid buying one litre of fuel in each OECD nation. This is especially true if one factors high conservation costs for example in controlling pests like the cane toad and rubber vine in remote areas. The fact that actual Australian fuel excise is not 99%, but nearer 1% of the OECD total says much about the influence of the car and energy industries in Australia, as well as our family- and community-oriented “car culture”.

This does not in any way diminish the fact that a situation where Australia pays a fraction the fuel excise of many entirely-glaciated nations with no land requiring uneconomic conservation stands untenable, nor that improvements as inadequate as increasing Australian excise from 25 percent to 50 percent the OECD mean would change nothing. History shows that even modestly and inadequately less cheap petrol (say down from 800 millilitres/$ to 600 millilitres/$) produces major effects on motoring habits – so what would a realistic cheapness of under 60 millilitres/$ achieve?? Fuel efficiency would increase spectacularly but resources to pay for the global costs of the vast quantity of greenhouse pollution Australia and its minerals produce would nonetheless become much greater. Moreover, Australia’s land supply is so abundant that such fuel taxes would not affect – especially if development regulations were simplified – family formation so much as lower taxes in the Enriched World do.

Europe: perversely leaders when it needs to be laggards – and vice versa for Australia

The notion that a “sustainable” energy policy is incompatible with economic growth is one that is often heard shrilly in the Australian media.

The facts are that Australia has abundant sunlight and some quite unconventional potential geothermal energy sources in its outback that would allow it to achieve a zero-emissions target that should be absolutely the first priority of any international climate protocol. Australia is a much bigger problem than Europe, the United States or China who need to regard themselves not as enemies engaging in petty quarrels over minor reductions, but as allies in a fight against high emissions from Australia and to a lesser extent South Africa and the Gulf States. Severe effects from anthropogenic global warming like:

1. Melbourne having 24 days in a month over 30˚C as against a previous record of 18
• this figure could easily see Melbourne have higher maxima than historically hot Halls Creek for this February as a rock-steady super-monsoon drenches northern Australia.
2. San Francisco receiving only 86 millimetres for the calendar year of 2013 and less than 10 percent of its virgin mean rainfall for the period from February 2013 to January 2014.

certainly mean something should be done to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The trouble is that it is being done in precisely the places where it makes least difference!

George Osborne certainly should fear his own nation going far ahead of the rest of the world – and so should every nation in Europe. The lack of natural resources in Europe is already economically crippling, especially with the industrialisation of China which, as Osborne says, could very easily affect even the production of renewable energy and related components. As I said in my previous post, the EU faces a perverse energy price-gap for a region that is in geological terms exceptionally energy-rich and bears negligible responsibility for anthropogenic climate change. Given its comparative disadvantage in supplying land and mineral resources, there is every reason that European energy prices should be the lowest, or very nearly the lowest, in the world. Contrary to what Calbick and Gunton imply completely eliminating EU energy taxes would have little impact on energy consumption and greenhouse emissions in the EU, whilst potentially ameliorating major demographic and social problems faced by the region. These are severely regulated by the lack of natural resources without further price controls.

Emissions reductions in the EU are unimportant vis-à-vis reductions in Australia where an abundance of coal and flat land make energy-efficient mass transit systems economically questionable and politically unviable. What Osborne hopefully can recognise is that campaigns for severe reductions by Australia will make a difference, which his own country could never make. They may be politically exceedingly difficult, but the key step is for people in Europe should recognise the warming they observe as being in no way their responsibility and, if it affects them, something other nations (chiefly Australia) have a severe duty to pay the cost of.

Were it put forward hard enough to Australia’s politicians and businesses that they possess this responsibility, the globe would be half-way to repairing the damage caused by burning of fossil fuels. With enough pressure and insistence that Australia pays the cost for climate change abroad (not, however, for natural disasters within the virgin climate range), and clear evidence for Australia}s responsibility already existing, this can hopefully be done, but politicians do not yet see it.

Calbick and Gunton have it half-there ‒ back to the 2008 Sunday Times

Suspicion that Australia’s rock-bottom energy prices are largely responsible for it ‒ with as Zhang et. al have demonstrated the lowest allowable per capita emissions in the world owing to its extremely low-phosphorus soils ‒ having actually the highest per capita emissions, yet being treated with extreme lenience by all amongst:

1. international treaties on global warming
2. international environmental lobby groups
3. academic works on the problem of greenhouse emissions

have been with me for a very long time.

However, it is only now that Thomas Gunton and K.S. Calbick have provided the first evidence that Australia’s excessively low energy prices are the cause of its high emissions, as much as its low population densities and dependence on energy-intensive metals. In a new study titled ‘Differences among OECD countries’ GHG emissions: Causes and policy implications’, they show that:

1. energy prices alone are by far the best predictor of total greenhouse gas emissions
2. that if Australia raised energy prices to the highest levels in the OECD, it would reduce its greenhouse emissions by sixty percent.

Demographic problems in the Enriched World make taxation rises dubious as a policy recommendation for the US and Canada. What will reduce their emissions without pushing them further into a demographic mire and eroding their ability to accept people from overpopulated Australia is unclear and I will not attempt such here.

However, with Australia, raising energy prices is an absolute necessity. Even a 60 percent reduction would put Australia’s emissions in the range of most Enriched countries, when the allowable value based upon soil available phosphorus cannot be higher than 5 percent the Enriched World average, or about 0.4 tonnes CO₂ equivalent per person per year, or about 1.5 percent of Australia’s current per capita emissions.

The question that Calbrick and Gutton need to ask is what energy price would reduce Australia’s emissions by the requisite 98.5 percent?? It might not, in fact, be as high as the extreme prices described on 24 April 2008 in the Sunday Times; indeed, political problems might step in at such high energy prices. Nonetheless, it would certainly be higher than the most expensive Enriched World nations, and such high prices would potentially have even more economic and ecological benefits than respectable emissions for by far the worst offender in greenhouse emissions.

A day in the cheap and nasty land

Today, as I collected a rebound first edition copy of Amy Lowell’s Men, Women and Ghosts – viewed by Piero Scaruffi as her best collection of poetry – I went to check for a few presents for relatives and for a Hawthorn box I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Although I knew Name a Game was relocating from the cramped inner city, I was shocked to know that it was relocating not to Epping, which would have been a convenient train ride from accessible Rushall Station, but to Braeside. Braeside is a remote industrial suburb between the Frankston and Cranbourne railways lines, and when I arrived at Mordialloc Station early on a very humid and warm afternoon, I asked where Urban Street was and none of the people there knew me except someone with an iPhone, and thought that I should try to go back to Mentone and walk down Boundary Road.

When I did this, fining Urban Street proved amazingly tough. The whole area is a large industrial complex along a wide six-land road that could be a freeway but for lacking special exits. it would be tough to cycle in even in better weather, but for walkers Boundary Road is a nightmare: there are no footpaths more than a block beyond Lower Dandenong Road, only overgrown grassy paths which I was able to walk to a number of shops to find Urban Street – and the shopkeepers did not know! I knew it lied a fair way from Lower Dandenong Road, but it was only after a while that I found it was off Malcolm Road halfway from Lower Dandenong Road to Mordialloc.

There is – or is not – a bus route down Boundary Road, whose stops can be seen as one walks along the overgrown grass. This bus – route number seven hundred and five – does not run except on weekdays during the peak hour, with a total of eight services each way. For those like me it is an utterly useless service since it does not run when my routine would permit me to be around – the shop does not even open until well after the last morning bus has gone! In cooler weather I could cycle from Mordialloc or even Dandenong (actually I would cycle in one direction if I did), but I never imagine doing so on a humid 27˚C day.

When I did find Malcolm Road, I saw the 705 bus actually turned down it by looking for the bus stop signs, but being around 14:00 that was of no use since the next bus was not until around 15:50! Once I finally found Urban Street, it was not difficult to see Christian’s wife and ask her about my games (which had come) and my Hawthorn box (which had not). I could not help saying to Elaine why Australia needs a rigid constitutional ban on road building, mandating that every last cent from both public and private sectors is invested in rail. There is simply no other way to reduce Australia’s emissions to the sole acceptable level of zero.

Once I left Name A Game, I felt no choice but to walk all the way to Mordialloc – downhill even though almost flat. By the time I saw the but stop in Governor Road at the edge of the industrial area, I was so tired I waited listening to a few favourite songs on my iPod for the forty minutes to the 709 bus – which with a rigid ban on road building (except bicycle tracks or busways perhaps) could be four minutes or less. Although I was tired and had many headaches, the trip home via Mordialloc, Hampton and the 250 bus route down Rathdowne Street was enjoyable and seeing me was a relief to my busy and potentially ill mother.

It would be a wonderful thing if visitors from the Enriched World had a good look at these industrial suburbs and compared the appalling public transport with the excellent services of Europe and Asia – which Australia’s exceptionally fragile ecology dictates it should surpass in quality because of the extremely high cost of carbon emissions. Foreigners can learn much more Australia by trying to travel on public transport in these suburbs and waiting a whole day for a 705 service – or having to wait an hour for those services that do run outside peak periods – than they can from inner cities with the less poor public transport and internationally focused academic populations. Whether Enriched World visitors see why they tolerate such poor quality services – the abundant space and low living costs – is very dubious.

It is a pity the land is so developed they cannot see Australia’s biodiversity at the same time and how different it stand from the species-poor Enriched World – though I did see a grey butcherbird in the grass and studying it can teach people from the Enriched World a good deal about birds that they would not expect, from female song to cooperative breeding.

The two-party denial machine

As I was just searching through my email, I found that Time had eight months ago published an article showing that since Obama came to power in 2008 the proportion of Republicans accepting man-made global warming as undisputed science has declined by two fifths from fifty to thirty percent. At the same time, those on the liberal side of politics have not changed remotely.

This is awfully troubling, not only because my own research clearly shows how rapid climate change has been in Australia over the past forty-five years, but also because non-academic parts of Australia, even if they vote Labor, appear to me politically akin to the most conservative parts of the United States.

What is crucial, but seldom understood, is how well-placed Australian corporations with a vested interest in denying the science behind anthropogenic global warming already were when climatic changes began to take hold in the late 1960s. Immediately before the big climatic turning point between 1967 and 1976, Australia had a mining boom somewhat analogous to what it is having today, with the only difference that the countries whose industrialisation was fuelled by Australian minerals were Japan, Italy and Spain rather than China and India.

What that meant was that at the very time anthropogenic global warming was “discovered” by writers like Barrie Pittock in the 1980s (his first major article was ‘Recent Climatic Change in Australia’ from 1983) politicians were being advised via roads departments directly by the car and related industries. Murray Lonie, after whom the 1980 ‘Victorian Transport Study’ upon which freeway expansion in Melbourne has been based was named, was originally an executive with General Motors. It says a lot about Australia’s politicians if any government chose or was forced to use someone likely to be so biased to assess transport policy! Along with the findings of the 2006 documentary The Greenhouse Mafia, this proves how corporations directly responsible for Australia’s very poor greenhouse emissions have been indisputably and constantly at very close call to politicians of both major parties, whilst climate belts have shifted so far that Perth now has the climate Carnarvon had before 1967. International strategies for reducing global greenhouse emissions must make countering such influence a top priority.

Even if Australia’s politicians are seriously not greenhouse sceptics (exceedingly doubtful with John Howard to mention only one), they are on a tight leash and have never showed themselves willing to execute essential changes to Australian energy and transport policy that would threaten the profits of the coal and aluminum industries, from greatly improved energy efficiency in houses to full taxation of aviation fuel to fund high-speed rail – which Australia should have developed decades ahead of countries like France and Japan.

As it stands, neither major parties nor even climate researchers are willing to come in tough on major greenhouse emitters, creating a situation where Australia alone could create runaway climate change without being policed internationally – as it should have been ever since the problem began. What is worse is that if the influence of these corporations grows, they might well deny climate changes even more obvious than those in Western Australia over the past forty-five years.

Global warming will be worse even that we think

According to this article in Green Left Weekly, the South Australian government is going to support a coal gasification project for the desertified northern agricultural regions of South Australia.

Underground coal gasification is a technique used to create fuels akin to natural gas from large coal seams too deep to be profitably mined. It has already been developed in Uzbekistan, but the plan near the town of Orroroo is the first example from a non-Muslim nation.

What Renfrey Clarke demonstrates is that underground coal gasification is extremely greenhouse-intensive and likely to eliminate entirely pressure for improved fuel efficiency in cars in Australia. Greenhouse-spewing four-wheel-drive vehicles will become even more the dominant mode of transport for cities that sprawl over even vaster deserts than Phoenix or Tucson ever have or will – and quite likely a more arid desert than Arizona, too.

The message Green Left Weekly give is dreadful. One must despair that the nation requiring incomparably the world’s lowest per capita greenhouse emissions has and always will have the highest. Nonetheless, the simple truth is that brains that could develop renewable energy have been drawn like a magnet from Australia by the surfeit of exceptionally cheap fossil fuels and land, whilst tightly-bound families have been driven away from countries ecologically able to support far larger populations by greater housing space and cheap electricity and cars.

This is one thing that Green Left Weekly – just as much as the other side of politics exemplified by Human Events and suburban Australia – have no hope of grasping. They (both) are wedded to the cultures where they originated, and have no experience of the possibilities offered by different ways of doing things. The result is that they – just as much as Human Events do with Europe, Canada and New Zealand – hope for culturally and economically impossible outcomes, no matter how desirable they stand ecologically. How the immense majority prefer this low-quality, slow-paced, limited-choice lifestyle to the high-quality, mass transit-based, hectic, “big choice” lifestyle the free market gives to Europe and East Asia is only grasped by specialised economists. Sensitive feeling types simply cannot handle this fast pace or crowding, so they are drawn to Australia and Red America in huge numbers to escape it. These same economists can and do show the intellectual thinking types who support journals like Green Left Weekly as elitist in the extreme and having no knowledge of what Australia’s masses want – or at all events want most.

That the gap between Australian emissions and European or East Asian one will grow and grow there is, with the discovery of underground coal gasification, no doubt at all.

That families will be lured to sprawling desert cities in Australia and away from the more pleasant (even for the migrants themselves) and ecologically more sustainable climates of Europe, Canada and New Zealand there is equally little doubt.

Australia will face demolished ecosystems before starvation

On the ABC today is an article which gives one the impression that Australia could face starvation from climate change. Whilst I have heard (and know) that Australia will face agricultural problems as a result of man-made global warming, if it really is true that Australians do not want forty million people here in a country that can sustain about two million without its surfeit of mineral resources, then such a majority must overcome its passivity to protest to eliminate subsidies to water and energy use.

People do not realise that, in ecological terms, water in Australia should cost far more per unit than it does in Europe or North America or New Zealand. Owing to the need for dense proteoid root systems, Australian rivers have extraordinarily low runoff ratios compared to those of comparable climates overseas. Because these low runoff ratios reflect a requirement of around 300 millimetres (twelve inches) of rain before the dense rooting systems allow any runoff at all, variability in Australian streams is twice as high or more as those with the same rainfall and identical precipitation variability in Eurasia, North America, or New Zealand. Thus, for the same size of storage in Australia, only around a fifth as much water can be yielded even when reservoir evaporation is ignored.

This would require Australian water prices uniformly at least five times those of Europe, North America or New Zealand. Given the dryness of Australia's climate south of the nineteenth parallel, one could argue ten times Northern Hemisphere prices as more reasonable.

The trouble is that in a free market any increase in prices would fail to disturb the enormous economic advantage Australia's farmers have. In a free market, entrepreneurs would know they could gain much by building a pipeline from the relatively well-watered portion of the continent north of the nineteenth parallel to allow farming on the dirt-cheap land in southern Australia. It is indeed very easy to see that this – or large-scale desalination – could be the way the world feeds itself unless people see an ecological duty to not eat Australian-grown foody.

The consequence of reversing a natural hydrology typical of the Mesozoic rather than the Quaternary, however, will be drastic for all Australia’s freshwater and terrestrial systems. Even those that survive man-made global warming will be destroyed if all the water from the well-watered north is turned to irrigate the arid south. How the northern rivers’ ecology would change from such moves is not known, but it would be very likely to destroy most species who are adapted to the extreme climate of the drought/flood tropics.

Koalas dying out, but no hard solution

According to this article, oddly published by a newspaper in Iran, koala numbers have fallen by as much as fifty percent since 2003. The article calls for their listing as an endangered species.

Whilst the article admits climate change is the problem, it simply fails to deal with discussion of how Australia must be at the very least punished by a total ban on trade unless its greenhouse emissions are reduced to a respectable level of around one percent the per capita world average. Alternatively, given Iran's oil resources, it could consider whether it is fair, owing to the high climate sensitivity of Australia's water resources and its unique flora and fauna, that oil be sold to Australia at greatly higher prices than it is to Europe or North America or New Zealand.

Nor does it discuss – a little strangely given Iran has itself had to deal with sanctions –- whether Australia's appalling greenhouse emissions justify something like trade sanctions (they certainly do). Nor does it consider that the majority of Australians have much less incentive to preserve koalas than Europeans or North Americans do to preserve their own “iconic” species.

Nor does it discuss how paleoclimate data collected no later than 2004 show that even Tasmania will be within the descending limb of the Hadley circulation as soon as 2020 under present climate trends, so that even the dry schlerophyll forests in which koalas live will die out.

In such a scene of ignorance, the koala will go extinct. What Tim Flannery showed in The Future Eaters about how koalas are adopted to a food source that is reasonably typical of most plants in the three hundred and thirty million years since the land first became vegetated will be lost forever if they die out. This is vital knowledge that we must fight the corporate polluters for the zero-emissions Australia that should have been the first thing demanded by any climate change conference.

How petrol's cheapness affects all prices

Today, I discovered an article showing that prices in the Euro zone are lower than they were last year.

However, those who think it relates to an economic collapse comparable to the Great Depression are entirely wrong. The only reason prices in the Euro zone are lower now than they were a year ago is the increased cheapness of petrol! Though I have not got figure on the volume of petrol one euro will buy for various European nations now and in July last year, it is clear that a barrel of oil has become more than twice as cheap as it was a year ago.

It is true though that the cheapness of oil has been increased by reduced fears of a major recession. However, what the chief point is that the cheapness of petrol has a dominating effect on the price of everything because petrol is essential to the present-day structure of goods transport. Where petrol is less cheap, everything else becomes less cheap too, which is why people here in Australia cannot accept that ecologically our living costs are outrageously low since at petrol prices that would reduce Australia's greenhouse emissions to an acceptable level, very few basic foods and other goods would be affordable at all.

Proof Australian petrol prices are an outrage

This mildly optimistic article in the Sydney Morning Herald shows just how much an outrage Australian petrol prices are. It proves that even a modest decrease in the volume of petrol a dollar buys will reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly. If Australia was serious about having the carbon emissions its ecology dictates - approximately four percent per capita those of Eurasia, the Americas or New Zealand - it would need to contribute about fifty percent of the total fuel tax of OECD nations rather than less the one percent. The fact that our people are unaware of the climate we are headed for with out current emissions levels of 400 to 500 percent those of the EU means they are willing to accept petrol that, in terms of ecological impact, is practically free.

Worse still, the way the Rudd Government is going it will give the mining companies who are a prime cause of Australia's exceptionally bad greenhouse emissions levels unwanted concessions. The only way Australia can control their political power, which constitutes a granite block against emissions reductions is, for all its inefficiencies, probably outright nationalisation.

The technology certainly exists for Australia to cut the fuel consumption of its cars to around one litre per 100 kilometres, which ought to be a standard required of all private vehicles in a sensitive environment like Australia. The need for innovation, a trait which Australia can afford to lack because of its monopoly on essential metal ores, would greatly alter the country’s culture to something that might approach sustainability.

The way in which this requires an activist government is unique in the world. Free markets give virtually no incentive to conserve Australia's coal and land reserves: supply exceeds demand to an extent never found in any previous human culture. The problem is that people in Australia know that their extremely free markets give a level of prosperity and wealth that has - adjusting for living costs - been consistently the highest in the world ever since Australia was settled. They are unwilling to lose this even if there is no other means of creating incentives to be massively more energy-efficient than countries in Europe, Asia, the America or New Zealand. Yet Tim Flannery has for over fifteen years consistently shown this as exactly what Australian wildlife has always had to be. Australian people should too try to be the most efficient in the world!

Australia is the backward country

In a recent article published in Australia, even the head of the world's largest producer of 1960s yank tanks and 1990s/2000s 4x4s is admitting that petrol should be less cheap than it is.

Their reasoning is certainly dubious since almost every economist knows larger, thirstier cars are more economic than small ones that use complex technologies like front-wheel-drive.

What the General Motors official is saying is that they are losing money on thirsty cars because for a period in 2008 petrol's cheapness rose in nominal terms to new record lows (in Australia, 600ml/$) and that car sales in the United States are the lowest since World War II. However, the logical point above is that General Motors would do best to concentrate on Ford Falcon-like rear-wheel-drive designs that are cheapest to produce if they want to maximise profits. After all, large front engine, rear-wheel-drive cars were what dominated the motor industry in the 1950s and 1960s when profits were at a maximum.

Even if 4x4s are very complex designs, phasing them out for similarly complex front-wheel-drive cars is not likely to restore profitability. It is surprising that books like the PIG to Capitalism do not say, as they logically show, that smaller cars with less space and higher cost that result from reduced cheapness of petrol serve to lower living standards.

On the other hand, it just shows how conservative and backward Australia is when its population is calling for still cheaper petrol in a country that should by virtue of its great ecological limitations to population size have by far the least cheap petrol in the world.

Ecological hell in "petrol paradise"

In a Tasmanian newspaper today, there is talk of wonderful reactions to petrol's cheapness rising to 1,110 millilitres per dollar.

The problem is that such high cheapness of petrol is awfully destructive to a country that refuses to set anything like a reasonable date for the elimination of carbon-producing fossil fuels - well, if you don't realise that a "reasonable date" for Australia to eliminate all private vehicle registration and coal-fired power would have been more like 1988 (with a balanced report rather than the car company sponsored Lonie Report) than 2020.

If Australia had common sense it would, regardless of public opposition, use the declines in pre-tax price of fuel and possible inflation to re-index excise on all fuel starting at a minimum of seventy cents a litre - still very low compared to ecological requirements but much better than the dirt-cheap thirty-eight cents a litre we have now. The inclusion of such discounted fuels as aviation fuel will eliminate the subsidies to air transport that encourage the production of titanium, which is the most greenhouse-intensive of all metals to produce and which should always be a target in greenhouse reductions. Titanium metal is primarily produced for aircraft and if some air routes that would be uneconomic without heavy subsidies then the reduction in greenhouse emissions would be much greater than merely from the aviation fuel no longer used.

Scientists in desperation, but is our population half-serious??

This recent article in The Canberra Times suggests – as I have worked out for half a decade now – that Australia is at far greater risk of runaway climate change than was ever thought beforehand. At long last our scientists are trying to persuade radical changes that should have taken place in the days of the horrific Lonie Report, whilst opinion polls in the US show clear support for radical measures to cut greenhouse emissions.

In his most recent work, Now or Never, Tim Flannery shows that only storage of carbon dioxide can prevent catastrophic climate change. The problem is, unlike his previous books Flannery really does go into the wildest flights of imagination in believing sustainable cities will soon be developed in Australia. He dreams a city based on geothermal power being developed in the centre of the continent! Whilst that might theoretically be possible, in reality I cannot see where the money would come from.

Even with Melbourne receiving less than 50mm of rain per year, it is hard to see how people could be persuaded to move such a distance. The abundant coal and land resources mean that even the complete drying up of southern Australia’s water resources could never make the tiniest difference to this. With petrol’s cheapness rising to 1330ml/$ according to reliable forecasts, the fuel efficiency of cars will tumble to record lows even as other countries mandate extremely strict emissions standards. (Indeed, such emissions standards could serve to further increase the cheapness of petrol in Australia by lessening competition from abroad). Public transport patronage will decline enough that the closures advocated by the Lonie Report become a reality – especially if a major depression does ensue.

The prosperity that record cheapness of petrol will cause would make it very hard for Australia’s politicians to really think about changing policies to improve sustainability. Already ultraconservative outer suburbanites will – even if they know of the changes taking place – feel extremely sensitive to governments taking their prosperity, and of course there is the obstacle of powerful mining and car companies opposed to any emissions targets.

Even if our scientists become more and more vocal, I do not see the fantastic plans put forward for dealing with Australia’s appalling emissions actually happening. Simpler, lower technology and more straightforward plans to phase out all private registration of motorised vehicles, revegetate farmland, shift metal smelting abroad and prevent further coal development make much more sense and if put forward passionately and vocally enough would have a much better chance.

A more accurate way of decribing the cost of petrol

As readers of my blog will be aware, my knowledge of runaway climate change and Australia’s abysmally low fuel excise rates has made me for a long time realise that the two words “petrol” and “expensive” should never be put together in the same sentence (or, more poetically, “never the twain shall meet”).

The fact that one can grammatically use “less cheap” to describe an increasing petrol price is unfortunately not realised by most people even in the environmental movement. I have been using "less cheap" over a decade and the disappearance of the southern winter rain belt in Australia makes me more determined to teach people not to put “expensive” and “petrol” in the same sentence.

This fact, I have come to think, creates a problem with the conventional method of describing the cost of petrol. By the conventional method of measuring by the amount of money for a given volume of petrol, people who have to pay for petrol can always say it is “less expensive” even when as currently petrol has never been so cheap.

What I have thought of doing since petrol’s cheapness began rising and rising is to measure how much one pays for petrol by the amount of petrol for a given sum of money (in Australia's case the number of millilitres of petrol per dollar, written ml/$.

This way:

• when the volume of petrol per dollar increases, one sees it really is getting cheaper (and its emissions of greenhouse gases make it always cheap)
• when the volume per dollar falls as it was earlier this year people with a constant sum of money are less able to produce greenhouse gases and less damage will be done to the climate.

The formula for convertine x cents per litre to y millitres per dollar is:

y = 100000/x

Thus:

• 3349 cpl (a price reasonable for Australia's sensitive environment) equals 29.85ml/$
• 99.9 cpl (a current price in Perth) equal 953.3ml/$.

Petrol above 1000ml/$ will mean ecological ruin

The last three months have seen the cheapness of petrol soar and Melbourne’s rainfall decline even more. September was the driest on record and there has been little improvement of late.

Such motives, along with eleven successive dry years, ought to convince everybody that Australia should have fuel taxes equal to the combined total of the rest of the world – which would provide incentive for extraordinary levels of innovation by our industry to make at the very least cars so fuel-efficient as to do no damage to the environment or better still a public transit system that will beat the car for any urban journey and most rural ones.

Yet, probably due to the mellowing of Islam that was predicted several years ago by the brilliant demographer Phillip Longman, petrol’s cheapness has been going up and up and up. From a low of a still-very-cheap 590 millilitres of petrol per dollar (590ml/$), petrol’s cheapness has been rising to 953ml/$ last Tuesday, and predictions suggest it could reach 1250ml/$ soon. Though being able to get 1250 millilitres of petrol for a dollar might not seem that cheap in comparison to past eras, it is equivalent to obtaining around 2050 millilitres for a 1988 dollar or 10,611 millilitres for a 1969 dollar.

In reality, petrol now is twice as cheap as in 1969. Indeed, petrol in Australia is currently cheaper than ever at a time when runaway climate change is becoming more and more definite. If petrol’s cheapness keeps increasing, another 4x4 boom is certain since with cheap petrol people who opted for small cars when it was less cheap will surely return to thirsty 4x4s.

If Australia wants to counter climate change, re-indexing petrol excise (which would cut the cheapness to 735ml/$ with excise at 70 cents per litre) and increasing aviation fuel and LPG excise to 70 cents a litre would be tiny step. Australia’s ecology is so fragile that for equivalent levels of protection it would require fuel excise to be around 70 or 80 percent of the OECD total instead of the actual level of 1 percent. Even if the least fragile countries in Europe might have fuel taxes beyond the ecologically necessary, that would mean Australia should aim for a maximum cheapness of 50ml/$ (in more conventional terms twenty dollars a litre). At such a price there would be enough money for a really first-rate public transit system – and with mining and car companies taxed sufficiently to eliminate their dictatorship over transport policy, the country that ecologically needs a superlative mass transit system far more than any other might finally get it.

Wayne Swan is wrong

The latest news from the government about the petrol price question really is far from promising.

The ABC is saying that Wayne Swan believes that less cheap petrol is not going to have any impact upon the level of greenhouse gas emissions by Australia. I simply cannot take this viewpoint.

To see why, go back before Kyoto - before the 1973 energy crisis. The fact is that the large differences in emissions we observe among developed nations today were already in place in 1973, before most people realised we only had a finite supply of crude oil.

The very fact that energy was less cheap via heavier taxes in Europe than in Australia or North America meant European companies had real incentive to be innovative and develop means of reducing energy consumption. Fuel consumption patterns, as I recall from old editions of Autocar, have always followed a pattern of decline when petrol becomes less cheap and a rise when its price falls back into the basement.

In Australia's history, petrol prices have never got anywhere near ground level. If prices did rocket out of the basement, Australian car makers would have a very different outlook from the conservative, staid one that they have had ever since major US automakers set up branches here seventy or so years ago.

The "household pain" Swan speaks about will only be temporary if people move away from gas-guzzling 4WDs, whose sales have not fallen at all since petrol's cheapness began its current decline. If people became use to pooling cars to eliminate empty space and even to sharing fuel bills for long trips, they would lose little even with petrol at $5 per litre.

Are they taking into account inflation?

Today I heard that the CSIRO says that petrol prices in Australia will reach eight dollars a litre within a decade.

When I first heard of eight-dollar-a-litre petrol, I thought they were releasing a climate change study that suggested $8 a litre would be the necessary price to reduce Australia's greenhouse emisisons to a reasonably sustainable level! As I have suggested in some earlier posts, even $8 a litre is too cheap if Australia wants to reduce its greenhouse emissions to virtually zero as would be required to maintain (restore, actually) the viability of water storages built at high cost in the 1950s. However, large increases in fuel prices would certainly provide more money than is needed to make Australia's transport system reasonably sustainable via demolition of unnecessary roads, reductions in road capacity and rebuilding of the entire rail system for high speeds and better alignment.

The whole problem is that there is the issue of inflation: the CSIRO report does not say explicitly that they mean eight of today's dollars per litre, which would be a decline in petrol's cheapness unheard of anywhere in the world since petrol became widely used.

Because rises in petrol prices are known to cause inflation, it is entirely possible that $8-per-litre petrol is really little less cheap than today's. Although it would require an inflation rate of seventeen percent to completely erode rises in the nominal price of petrol, if a general inflation rate of four percent continues to 2018, it will be as if petrol has only risen to $5.40 per litre, and at an inflation rate of eight percent it would be equivalent only to a rise to $3.70 per litre in today's dollars. Whilst both of these would be uncomfortable, they would hardly be the radical change called for: in fact, $3.70 is the amount paid in the exceptionally low-fragility environment of Norway and would be equivalent of we adjust for Australia's ecological fragility to something like $37 per litre!