View From The Couch - 31/Dec/2016

Just Guessing But...

I've been pondering this problem of global warming. First of all, we've run past 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not even counting the CH4 Methane, and Methane is of course 4 times worse than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Our democratic processes in the first world are simply not getting anywhere near the results we need to curb the runaway emissions growth. If you look just at Australia for instance, the mining interests for fossil fuels have spent so much money to cripple the proper discussion of this threat that it has become nigh impossible to make any sensible progress on the issue. While nations around the world are moving over to renewables in a hurry, it appears that the USA and Australia are going to be the stupid holdouts sticking to fossil fuels.

The thing is, the massive problem of emissions isn't just a problem isolated to the climate, but something that will have a chain reaction in food production. Agriculture is going to take hit as a result of the effects of climate change, and the most vulnerable nations are places with big populations with very little food security - like China and India. If it ever gets to the point where not enough food can be produced to supply these countries, they are going to have riots on their streets, and in the case of China, the suppression of those riots will probably lead to a revolution - exactly the kind of outcome the current regime will want to avoid.

So if you work backwards from the pointy end of the problem, it's far more likely that an authoritarian regime will try and invest in technologies that will actively suck out carbon from the atmosphere in order to bring the problem back under control. I imagine that the Chinese government will spend whatever is necessary to create massive renewable power plants with the specific purpose of converting atmospheric carbon into liquid or solids.

Here are some examples of technologies out there already:

• Synthetic Photosynthesis.
• Nano Spike Catalyst lowers energy threshold to reverse combustion and harvest ethanol.
• Large scale carbon capture projects
• Capturing carbon and turning them into building materials

The thing is, Green groups would have you believe that this is futile and what needs to happen is zero economic growth or some such nonsense. Geo-engineering is a dirty word in the Green paradigm, but when you look at just how much runaway emissions are going on, and how capping emissions is still going to get us into a world where the sea level rises by meters and the weather patterns are going to be shot, then it's easily arguable that what needs to be done is to shove the carbon genie back into the bottle.

If you're running China - an authoritarian state that's not scared to crack a few eggs - one of the advantages is that you can send a directive out and it gets done on a massive scale. It is the most likely candidate to simply order massive solar and wind generators to power these projects en masse with the specific purpose of capturing as much carbon s possible, and lowering the parts-per-million figure back below 400ppm. And they may well do this while we in the first world are still stupid enough to be arguing whether Global warming is actually happening and whether we should do something a bit more serious than Direct Action in Australia as we keep digging up fossil fuels.

Worse still, the countries that don't move out of fossil fuel will end up paying for the fact that they keep emitting because China will send them a bill for all the carbon it is capturing, through an international emissions trading scheme.

Of course, China might not do any of this, in which case we're really going to be stuffed. But if you go through the ay in which the cards are stacked, you can see China would see the advantage in going hard in this direction. And if they do, the countries most committed to fossil fuels are going to end up paying up big time.

RIP Debbie Reynolds (1932-2016)

Away after Carrie Fisher passed away, her mother also passed away.

Starring in the legendary musical Singin' In The Rain and singing the hit song Tammy. Shining on Broadway and being nominated for an Oscar for The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her own TV comedy show and an Emmy-nominated role in the sitcom Will & Grace. 

Debbie Reynolds' showbiz career exemplified an old-style versatility – singin', dancin' and actin' – that continued well into her veteran years. 

Her death at 84 a day after daughter Carrie Fisher added sadness to sadness. Son Todd's comments that "she's with Carrie" and that the stress of his sister's death was "too much" for his mother showed the paralysing impact of grief. 

Reynolds, who had a suspected stroke, will be best remembered as a luminous talent on stage, film and television - Hollywood royalty. Wholesome and charming in her early roles, she was later known as a brassy personality who was portrayed as an overbearing showbiz mother in Fisher's semi-autobiographical novel Postcards From The Edge.

It's just been a terrible year for celebrity deaths.

RIP Alphonse Mouzon (1948-2016)

This happened in the jam session of duelling deaths.

Alphonse Mouzon, a powerful jazz drummer who made his greatest contributions with a funk backbeat, forging a standard for 1970s fusion, died on Sunday at his home in the Granada Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. He was 68. 

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Jean-Pierre Mouzon said. Alphonse Mouzon learned this fall that he had neuroendocrine cancer and used a crowdfunding platform to help pay for treatment. 

Few other drummers were as integral to the development of fusion as Mr. Mouzon, who combined volcanic intensity with a brisk attunement to dynamic flow. He played in the first edition of Weather Report, and was a charter member of another defining jazz-rock band, the Eleventh House, led by the guitarist Larry Coryell. 

Mr. Mouzon had a productive association with the pianist McCoy Tyner, playing in a volatile acoustic setting on albums like “Sahara” (1972) and “Song for My Lady” (1973). He also served as the propulsive engine on notable fusion albums by the keyboardist Herbie Hancock, the flutist Bobbi Humphrey and the guitarist Al Di Meola, among others. 

Outside of jazz, Mr. Mouzon worked with major touring acts including Carlos Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. The drummer John Bonham of Led Zeppelin acknowledged him as an influence.

I want to write more about Alphonse Mouzon, but I'm really bummed about all of these deaths.

RIP George Michael

As everybody with a heartbeat knows, this also happened on Christmas Day.

I kind of refrained from writing about George Michael because his cause wasn't exactly mine and his music never really did much for me. But seeing that all these other people are dropping like flies, I figured I may as well acknowledge it here.

Ugh, what a year

Will It Never End?

No, Really, Is This The Way We'll Be Forever?

When I cast my mind back to the events that led to Kevin Rudd's Removal, I'm led back to the chain of events involving the ETS. In late 2009, the ALP Government worked hard to get an agreement at Copenhagen, and of course that fell to bits. In the wake of Copenhagen ending up in smithereens without an agreement in sight, it suddenly put into sharp focus the likelihood that Australia was going to introduce an Emissions Trading Scheme that was tailored for a world in which there had been an agreement in Copenhagen. And this whole fiasco triggered the sequence of events culminating in The Removal (I'm putting in caps so we can understand it like we understand The Dismissal).

In short, Julia Gillard - a good union stalwart that she is - opposed the ETS. It was too soon in her opinion and best buried. So on her advice, and Wayne Swan's advice, Kevin Rudd postponed it indefinitely to the never-never. This led to his polls collapsing. Then he tried to jump start his polls by doing the mining tax and that led to a mining industry backlash campaign, which further damaged his standings in the poll. And so it was time to do a bit of damage control, remove Kevin Rudd, soothe the public, and go to an election to shore up the ALP position. Of course we know what happened then: Julia Gillard campaigned on not having an ETS or a Carbon Price and ended up with a hung Parliament. To form government, she then had to do a fateful backflip and team up with the Greens who made it conditional to have a Carbon price followed by an ETS.

Consequently any time she claimed the carbon price was a good thing, she sort of looked like a real wally because it was difficult to imagine a person who fought and politicked against it twice - knifing a Prime Minister in the process - going on to sell something she clearly didn't put as great an emphasis upon, unlike the man who said it was the greatest moral challenge of our time. Yes, the very same PM she knifed. Power-hungry psychopath he may have been; a chaotic screaming control-freak he might have been; but at least he clearly wanted to do the ETS and do it right.

During the Gillard years I often got asked by ALP supporters why I still wanted Kevin Rudd to come back and I had to explain the above from scratch, each and every time. Put simply, Rudd was the guy who was willing to do the right thing. Gillard was the party hack that made sure it didn't happen until it became incumbent upon her to make it happen. You see, she's never been a conviction politician as far as the track record tells you. She's been an apparatchik, stayed an apparatchik, and her Prime Minster-ship was marked by moments she declared her position very much like an elevated apparatchik. ("I am not a social democrat."- great one, lady, just great!)

It's all water under the bridge now because Clive Palmer helped Tony Abbott get what he wanted, by repealing the carbon 'tax', which also involved a circus double act involving Al Gore of all people.(My head still spins when I think of that moment) Thus, one would think that all of this is so far in the rear view mirror of Australian politics except Julia Gillard is now trying to sell a book about all this form her point of view. No wonder she's been in the headlines a lot in the last week.

Why would she want to sell a book now? She's made for life, she's never going to starve or want for anything material. It's only been a year since she's been ousted. Why now? Why the money grab now? Is she dying of cancer? Is she migrating to England or somewhere, leaving us all behind? The last thing we need right now is a detailed rendition of her account in print. Really - we need that like we need a hole in our heads.

Naturally, Kevin Rudd thinks her account is fiction. It's fair to say he is being provoked.

On Wednesday, Mr Rudd fired back at the woman who knifed him politically and took over the nation's top political job in June, 2010. 

"Consistent with the past, Mr Rudd has no substantive comment to make on Ms Gillard's latest contribution to Australian fiction," Mr Rudd said through a spokesman. "The Australian people have long reached their own conclusions about Ms Gillard's relationship with the truth – from the coup to the carbon tax." 

"They have also reached their own conclusions on Ms Gillard's continuing efforts to reconstruct a justification after the event for her actions in June 2010 by trying to dress up personal political ambition as some higher purpose for the party and the government."  

Mr Rudd's former deputy prime minister, Anthony Albanese, moved to shut down discussion about the damaging political split that ultimately cost Labor government after just six years, during a National Press Club speech on Wednesday. 

"People have their critics but the fact is that Julia Gillard is a friend of mine, she remains a friend of mine; Kevin Rudd is a friend of mine, he remains a friend of mine. I'm about looking towards the future," he said. "If the entire caucus was concentrating on the needs of the Labor government rather than internals every day then I might be here without shadow before my portfolio."

At this point I want the both of them to fade back into history instead of trying to get their version out. It doesn't matter any more. Between the both of them, they managed to screw the pooch.  The both of them need to make a sanguine appraisal of that bit of history and their lousy part in it. We, on the other hand, have the immensely ugly and hopelessly difficult task of living under the utterly insane Abbott Government - a disaster they played great part in ushering in.

News That's Fit To Punt - 03/Sep/2014

Why? Because Fuck You

Everything this Federal Government does is tainted by a sort of grubby conflict of interest. Of course that's not confined to the Federal Government, because the greater conflict of interest might actually be Clive Palmer who owns a dirty big mining company, gets to make deals where a tax like the mining tax can get repealed. It's hard to imagine a more egregious and gratuitous case of helping yourself because you can.

The deal has meant that the government will halt the rise of superannuation. Naturally, with the sensibility of a cheesy movie villain, Tony Abbott tried to sell this as more cash in hand for employees which, frankly made me choke on my lunch. I'm sorry to tell you Mr. Prime Minister, but that's money that'll stay in the pockets of companies. Paul Keating has lambasted the government but honestly, if he wanted to still have a meaningful voice, he should've stayed on in parliament after 1996.

The repeal of the Mining Tax was of course one of the platforms of the Coalition so we ought not be surprised, but really, it is pretty disgusting how the Coalition are totally happy to sell out Australian citizens in favour of a gaggle of mining billionaires - Clive Palmer among them - and try to sell it as being good for the worker. Can it get any worse?

Yes it can. Here's how.

An Inconvenient Ruse

The emissions for energy generation jumped the most in eight years, since the end of the carbon tax.

So much for Al Gore coming to lend a hand in fighting the good fight against global warming. Thanks to the repeal, polluters have gone back to a kind of burn-baby-burn mentality and now it's out of control. Of course the plan by this government is also to smash the renewables industry, and directly pay these polluters to stop polluting.

It's like government by stupidity. You'd never have guessed thing would get this bad. No sane mind would have guess it would get this bad. But this unrelenting awfulness - "Operation Ongoing Enormous Clusterfuck" according to FDOM - was their platform! Grin and bear it.

Pink Batts Coming Home To Roost

Pleiades swung this one at me today. The best bit of news might be how the Royal Commission into the Pink Batts has yielded interesting results. In as much as it was a blatant witch hunt, it looks like it delivered a result that was assumed by the proponents of the Commission. Here's something from Crikey which is behind a pay wall:

 

First, Hanger found the training regime and regulations at the time of the first of four fatalities in October 2009 to have been seriously inadequate:
"With the exception of South Australia, which had a licensing regime for insulation installers, there was no insulation-industry specific regulation beyond the generally applicable occupational health and safety regulation."
But here’s the thing: then-minister for the environment Peter Garrett and his staff had spent most of 2009 tightening regulations and procedures. Hanger listed more than 40 interventions to address safety deficiencies -- all completed before October. So if the safety framework was still deficient by then, it must have been woefully, if not criminally, inadequate prior to 2008. Having presided over industry growth to the level of about 200,000 new and existing houses insulated annually, the previous Coalition government cannot escape culpability.

Secondly, Hanger opened wide the door to those wanting compensation for the program’s sudden termination:
"I find as follows:
"... the effect of the losses was to devastate many long-standing businesses ... and to cause as well personal financial collapse and severe despair and emotional harm;
"that harm and such circumstances justifies pre-existing businesses being compensated."
If compensation is won, it will be the Abbott government scrambling to find the funds.
This has a certain rough justice about it, of course. There is an argument that the scheme was not intrinsically dangerous and was not failing, rather that it suffered from extreme misreporting from the outset, by both Coalition MPs and a feral media.

Thirdly, the Commissioner was scathing about Abbott’s staff in the course of the inquiry:
"The Commonwealth did not suggest one witness that ought to be called. It did not generally volunteer documents that were not the subject of a summons to produce. It did not elicit any evidence of its own volition. All of this is despite the fact that it was the repository of the critical documents and the corporate knowledge of what had transpired."

Not even Peter Garrett copped such a shellacking:
"Furthermore, the Commonwealth hampered the work of those assisting me by the way in which documents were produced ... Other than in response to a specific request from the Commission, there seemed no logic in the order in which documents were produced. The Commission asked that documents be produced chronologically, however the Commonwealth did not oblige."

Finally, the Commissioner made it clear that if the federal government initiated the program, then safety is definitely its problem. Never mind the long history of state responsibility.
"There was much debate about whether workplace health and safety issues were a matter that was of any concern to the Australian Government, or whether it was more properly the concern of the States and Territories. It was said, by a number of federal public servants, that the Australian Government had no regulatory power in the field of workplace health and safety, and therefore that it was not a risk that the Australian Government could control. In my view, this attitude was deplorable."

That means occupational health and safety is now firmly a problem for the Federal Government. Every time somebody dies in an accident, he article suggests a ministerial head is going to roll. Worse still, the responsibility for the failure didn't just get sheeted home to the Rudd Government, it also got sheeted home to the Howard Government, and last I checked Tony Abbott was the health minister in the government. This thing is going to boomerang right back at him.

The Housing Bubble That Isn't But Of Which We Must Be Wary


For months - no make that years! -we've been hearing that Australia does not have a housing bubble problem. All the economists who have come and pointed out the great anomalies of housing prices in Australia have been laughed out of the public discourse while the anomalies only get bigger. As late as last month Glenn Stevens of the RBA was talking down any possibility that what we had on our hands was an actual bubble! No, he simply reiterated that sometimes the property market goes down. This month he's taking a different tack and saying there might be nasty shocks. Included in that link is a bit covering China where he cites a downturn in China might manifest itself as a nasty shock. If that wasn't enough, David Gonski of the ANZ Bank told the Australian British Chamber of Commerce that booming prices cannot possibly continue forever (now there's a brave call).

And lo an behold there's news that China's real estate market is going screwy. Some might even say it is crashing like it was a Global Financial Crisis. Speaking of crashing, the commodities market in China is crashing. I wonder if those things combined would form this so-called 'Nasty Shock' Glenn Stevens is talking about? Or will Sydney's housing prices simply just shrug it off and keep climbing?

Stay tuned for more fun!

 

 

 

 

Torpedo Clive

Sinking Abbott's Boats

If yesterday was eventful and humiliating for the Coalition government, then today must have been a gourmet meal built around a shit sandwich from Clive Palmer. Essentially, the Palmer United Party thwarted the government's third attempt to repeal the Carbon Tax.

The Pulse during the day made for interesting reading as things went awry for the Abbott Government. Reading the entires it seems really clear that the Coalition promised to word it in a particular way, and then in classic sophist-fashion, welshed on the deal by changing the wording which got the ire of Clive Palmer.

Late in the day Pleiades gave me a heads up about how Clive Palmer was on 702 later in the afternoon, talking to Richard Glover. The interesting thing is that Palmer says he was double-crossed by the Coalition in the wording and so he simply wouldn't support the Carbon Tax repeal bill that was so important to the Coalition. He then went onto say he won't support the co-payment to doctors, and h would rather cut the 45billion off the NBN, 20billion off the Paid Parental Leave being proposed, and 37billion dollars ear-marked for Japanese submarines, than have the Co-Payment.

Here's an interesting article on the day's proceedings from Tony Wright. Tony Abbott has a huge problem on his hands and he can't control it. He can now call a double dissolution but his polls are so dire he dare not. What threadbare preposterous notions the Coalition might have had as policy is being torn asunder. It's well-deserved, but it's going to cripple his government. He's not going to be able to game Clive Palmer out of the game quickly.

Pleiades had an interesting observation. He thinks Clive Palmer probably sees the end of coal fire and fossil fuels around the globe and wants to get into renewables; but to do so, he wants there to be a market for him to function within and that means retaining the outlines for an ETS. From that angle you can begin to understand the how and why of his road to Damascus conversion on an ETS and not removing the emissions target. In any case, things are only going to get more interesting for the Abbott Government. The inability of the Coalition to negotiate anything is starting to look like a major stumbling block in them getting their policies through.

Give The New Guys A Chance

Surprise! Not Your Villain du Jour

Ricky Muir - he of the Roo-Poo flinging Youtube videos and much media ridicule - entered Parliament House as a new Senator this week. By 10:30am this morning he had made news, first by not letting the Abbott Government have its way by steam-rolling the Carbon tax repeal. In a surprise move, Muir broke ranks with the Palmer United to defeat the government's motion to force a vote on the the Carbon Price repeal. After lunch, he sided with Palmer United and voted to preserve ARENA, which, surprised most onlookers.

Maybe Mr. Muir was going to surprise everybody any way. The way he had been portrayed by the media made him look like a dimwit yokel, but I felt at the time it was a beat up. By hook or crook, we in the electorate seem to have managed to send a totally ordinary citizen into the Senate. If our chief complaint is professionalised politicians, then surely we have to leave some ground open for rank outsiders to come in and have a look for themselves. While Mr. Muir didn't look promising going in, partly because of the immense vagueness of his party's platform, this week so far shows that he may yet turn out to be a reasonable, centrist man to have in the senate to balance views. So far his two major contributions don't seem to be those of an ideological extremist or a radicalised desperado.

The other surprising tidbit that emerged during the week was how Glenn Lazarus - aka The Brick with Eyes - was instrumental in bringing Clive Palmer to the middle of the debate so that the emissions target would be kept. This was remarkable in as much as it showed the Palmer United Party is not Clive Palmer's puppet show, and that in turn he was somebody who was going to be persuaded by his new senators.

Again, it's hard to imagine just what would bring a retired Rugby League great into politics in this way - especially after Mal Meninga made a famously bad attempt at it - but it is clearly evident we can't be dismissing him on the basis of his previous career or his current party affiliation. The fact of the matter is we don't know much about the policy position of the Palmer United Party simply because the party is so new and everything seems to be made up on the fly. They can conjure Al Gore from a hat, so who are we to judge what they can accomplish? The PUP Senators represent an open end, rather than a closed, conservative alternative.

The silver lining on the generally angry black storm cloud that is the Abbott Government is that the Senate is so fractured that it's just going to have to fight out every policy morsel on its merits. This means that it can't bundle together things hoping for a horse trade. This Senate is fractious enough already that if anything it's going to be more parsing and demanding than previous Senates. This means that while the Carbon Pricing will likely be repealed, it is going to get replaced with an ETS of some description - even if it is priced to zero until certain conditions are met. It's quite the circus, but the point is that the Abbott government will find out just how little an endorsement it got from the electorate for it to be able to claim any kind of mandate. Our hopes actually rest with Ricky Muir and Glenn Lazarus being centrist, reasonable people. It's a far cry from the Democrats but they may well turn out to be more credible and laudable in the history books than Meg Lees and Natasha Stott-Despoja.

HAP-less In Australia

Household Assistance Package

A few weeks ago I went to a focus group and it turns out it really was the government trying to suss out how to gauge their ads for the Household Assistance Package. I tell you, it was Hilary Hilaroid and the Hilarities; they asked what they thought of various words. When they said 'packages', I told them it reminded me of male genitals. After that, they stopped noting my input. I see that somehow they ended up using the word, in spite of my good advice. :)

At least they say "Millions of Australians... instead of "Six million Australians..." - That was sensible of them.