Category Archives: Resources

It’s the politics (stupid)!

If his­tory has rules, one must be that inter­est smoth­ers con­cept (and eats its lunch). The polit­i­cal chal­lenges of imple­ment­ing any big, dis­rup­tive tech­nol­ogy on a large scale inevitably deflate the hopes of tech­no­log­i­cal opti­mists. The com­mer­cial chal­lenges track closely behind. This is why, if for no tech­ni­cal rea­son, the pro­jec­tions in Treasury’s 2008 ETS …

July 5, 2011 – 2:24 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Do the math, PM

The Prime Min­is­ter wants to re-engage with the evi­dence. Good! But she is appar­ently unable to read the advice of her own “experts”. Or add-up: “…Global warm­ing will see seas rise by pos­si­bly up to a metre by the end of the cen­tury — that’s a huge risk to many parts of our coun­try” Extract …

July 4, 2011 – 3:38 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (2)

So now it’s a coal tax?

What is the point of the “emis­sions” tax now? By exclud­ing petrol from their pro­posed tax, the Labor/Green alliance have moved the goal posts to make the tax look less like an “own-goal” to the con­sumer. In doing so they have made coal pro­duc­tion and use an explicit tar­get, although that is where our com­par­a­tive …

July 4, 2011 – 7:50 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Learning to love the Boom

Sen­sa­tion sells, of course (“Salut DSK!”). Today’s Aus­tralian car­ries a gloom-laden account of Trea­sury Sec­re­tary Mar­tin Parkinson’s address to the Mel­bourne Institute’s Eco­nomic and Social Out­look con­fer­ence about struc­tural chal­lenges posed by the min­er­als boom. But news­pa­pers have been slower to pick up on two other talks at the same con­fer­ence that I found still more …

July 2, 2011 – 11:39 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Debate and decision

The peer­less Henry Ergas offers a clever cat­e­chism of the Euro­pean Mon­e­tary Union that first accom­mo­dated, then rewarded, eco­nomic mis­man­age­ment in south­ern Europe and finally smeared its con­ta­gion across world mar­kets. He traces the fault to the arro­gance of cru­sad­ing Euro enthu­si­asts “Much like Europe’s emis­sions trad­ing scheme, the euro was a “solu­tion” imposed by …

July 1, 2011 – 10:35 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged | Comments (0)

Big tobacco bites back

The Gillard government’s plain pack­ag­ing for cig­a­rettes leg­is­la­tion is dis­com­fort­ing even for those who have no patience with the huge and unnec­es­sary costs that tobacco use imposes on the Aus­tralian pub­lic health sys­tem. It looks like another piece of heavy-handed, “go for the jugu­lar” gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion (like the appalling NBN, the car­bon tax and the …

June 30, 2011 – 10:00 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Alarm or deny

How can it be that the same data on tem­per­a­ture trends and sea-levels sup­ports such rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent agen­das? Because the data, from time to time, does not strongly deter­mine any way of look­ing at the world. This obser­va­tion is as cogent today as it was when it first appeared; per­haps more so. The total­ity of our so-called …

June 29, 2011 – 3:52 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)