“Libertarian” versus “libertine”: two confused concepts

My brother often calls himself “libertarian”, but tends strongly to disagree with what is generally referred to as “libertarian”, such as:

• a minarchist government dedicated only to protection of people against violence
• a tax system without direct personal or corporate income taxes
• a complete absence of regulatory bodies
• no public welfare and reliance by those unable to work on savings or private charity
• private provision of traditional “government” services such as:
• defence
• intelligence
• scientific services (meteorology, agricultural research etc.)

James Poulos, whom I do not know despite having frequently read Front Porch Republic, points out that in fact most of the “Millennial Generation” who call themselves “liberatarian” are in fact politically big-government, supporting what Poulos calls the “pink thought police” (the pink being a reference to the use of pink as a symbol for homosexuality).

Recent polls agree with Poulos’ point that:

“It’s not death to the state these libertarians want, it’s the state as cool parent, with a stripper pole in every pot.”

This is vindicated by the recent study ‘Individualist Millennials and Communitarian Conservatives’, which shows clearly that the Millennial Generation of the Enriched World, nurtured by the late Boomers who came of age in the Bush Senior Era, are not libertarians but radical individualists, who wish to eliminate any moral standards and place trust only in those institutions which they can manipulate to this end.

The correct word for such radical individualism based on

“refusal to admit limits to the gratifications of the self”

is libertine. “Libertine” is a word scribes appear reluctant to use of the emerging Millennial Generation in the Enriched World despite the evidence of polls, perhaps because they feel it a little derogatory and that they might have no reason for their radically individualistic values.

It is true that for many school kids (as I can testify) a community of fans of AC/DC – the band who more or less invented modern libertinism for the masses – does give a sense of belonging and one which I lacked as a child. However, the immaturity inherent in supporting a band preaching such violent messages as “I shoot to thrill and I’m ready to kill/I can’t get enough and I can’t get my fill” (which can be nothing except a desire to be a serial killer for the sake of it regardless of what AC/DC’s apologists have you believe) means that mature relationships must be tough for those brought up in such communities, and such seems to be showing in today’s Enriched World.

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.

Are Australians clearer?

For a few weeks now, I have noticed the following discussion where it is hard to tell which speaker the writer actually is:

“Did you watch the game anon?”
“What game?”
“The football game, Pats vs Saints.”
“I’m sorry my friend, I don’t know of any football teams that have that name.”
“Dude of course there are, do you not watch football?”
“Do you mean handegg?”
“What the (expletive) is handegg?”
“The American sport, handegg, where you use your hands and throw an egg-shaped ball around?”
“What? No it’s called football.”
“No. It’s handegg.”

What looking at this makes me think is that Australians, who refer to various codes of football by names like “soccer” and “US gridiron” are actually much clearer than Europeans or Americans saying “football” without even a simple qualifier like “American”.

Whilst some English people laud that “soccer” is translatable only by a word related to football in most foreign languages, they overlook that there are no languages where a word derived from translating “hand” and “egg” or adapting “handegg” is used for gridiron (American football). The same is even true for the non-pejorative “gridiron” which accurately described the shape of the field and its intensely collision-based nature.

So, perhaps people should think of a way to describe these different forms of “football” without resorting to pejorative terms?? It would be so clear if people said “the gridiron game” or “soccer teams” or “Australian rules game”.

Facing up to our responsibility

This Law Dome snowfall series has been used in Tas D. van Ommen’s and Vin Morgan’s ‘Snowfall increase in coastal East Antarctica linked with southwestWestern Australian drought’ (Nature Geoscience, 7 February 2010) to demonstate how un-natural modern observed low rainfalls are.

Tonight, after a rather quiet afternoon and evening in the State Library, I was told by a tired mother that it was 42˚C today. This could lead to a record number of days over 40˚C this summer with another forecast and no sign of mild weather again – after a promising start to January. Whilst I feel I have said too much too “noisily” over the years about the solution to the problem, I will note very clearly two utterly false denial signs:

1. Greenhouse scepticism – whilst it reigns supreme amongst those who fear loss of convenience or privacy in Australia’s suburbs, the scientific evidence from studies such as those of the Law Dome ice core and Perth water flow data is too strong.
• What needs to be done is for education series, instead of being focused fuzzily on abstract temperature series, to be focused instead on practical cases like changes in SWWA, Central Chile, or CWA rainfall, where easily understood, precise data can be seen.
2. Denial of responsibility – an all-too-common problem is belief that Australia’s emissions have no significant impact by themselves on the global climate. This occurs even in peer-reviewed articles like ‘Halving global CO₂ by 2050: technologies and costs’ and ‘Illustrated implications of the Terrifying New Math of Meinshausen and McKibben’ which do not go into details about Australia’s emissions and instead focus on China, India, Russia and the United States. There are several problems with this attitude:
1. As Zhang et. al. have shown, Australia’s extremely low soil phosphate means that it has much lower absorption capacities than other major emitters, and hence a lower allowable emissions value
2. Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest in the world so that each Australian – living on the lowest-energy land in the world – makes the greatest contribution
3. Most greenhouse emissions in China and India, and to a lesser extent other Eurasian and Western Hemisphere nations, are built from Australian coal and aluminium so are indirectly the responsibility of Australia

For these three reasons, there needs to be a culture of responsibility amongst the next generation of Australians – one where it is acknowledged Australia bears unique responsibility for creating and hence for solving climate change. This responsibility is one that must extend to both ordinary Australian citizens – most especially when doing the responsible thing and cycling or using public transit for every journey is uniquely tough – and for tourists who, used to higher-quality public transport in countries with incomparably less need for it, must not sacrifice keeping emissions lower for convenience even if they could at home. In fact, the attitude towards Australia’s environment among tourists is one that has to change a great deal: although Australia may seem peculiar and strange to those used to uniquely fertile and young soils, it is not peculiar but how Eurasia and the Americas looked a mere 20 million years ago.