Iceland: trekking on the Sólheimajökull glacier

The Sólheimajökull glacier is a small glacier that has its source in the large icecaps in the Icelandic highlands.

Sólheimajökull

People climbing Sólheimajökull

The glacier is easily accessible from Reykjavik and so has been extensively studied for effects of climate change. The melting rate of Sólheimajökull has been measured at a frightening 40m per year. Each year there has been significantly more extensive melting as the glacier continues to recede.

A crevasse caused by melting

Another crevasse

Ice cave

Our guide continued to point out the previous extent of the glacier which starkly put into perspective the impact that climate change is having on the world.

He finished by saying that for the first time ever that it would be unlikely that the tour could be held in the next summer due to the continued melting of this beautiful environment.

It is clear: climate change is happening, it is affecting the icecaps and it is irresponsible for governments to continue to ignore the facts for partisan politics.

Sólheimajökull outflow

This was the last stop in Iceland - next stop: Munich

Sceptics and Ideologues

Scientific scepticism (or rational scepticism) is the practice of questioning or doubting the veracity of conclusions that lack empirical evidence or rely on non-reproducable experimentation. For example, the Berkely Earth Project set out to test climatologists research:

"Existing data used to show global warming have met with much criticism. The Berkeley Earth project attempts to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses by making available an open record to enable rapid response to further criticism and suggestions. Our results include our best estimate for the global temperature change and our estimates of the uncertainties in the record."

-From Berkeley Earth Project FAQ

The project took a sceptical approach to the earth temperature measurement to test some of the assertions made against climatologists. This independent analysis of both the data used by the IPCC and the arguments put by critics of climate change is an example of a sceptical, scientific method of analysis.

In contrast, an ideologue is a partisan advocate of a particular position or theory - for example [Emphasis mine]:

"Climate change sceptic Ian Plimer's book "How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents and Punters" arms children with 101 questions to challenge their teachers...

The 250-page book includes a list of questions intended to embarrass poorly prepared teachers."

Plimer and his denialist friends are very fond of using the title of "sceptic" because the term lends them some sort of scientific credibility. However, Plimer is not a sceptic, he is an ideologue and his book is pure ideology.

It is little surprise that he got one of Australia's most ideologically-driven leaders to launch it.

Of pizza and the privatisation of public policy

Pizza has been declared a vegetable.

The United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) proposed food standards were undermined by a congressional spending bill that enabled pizza to be counted as a vegetable. The bill was the result of lobbying by the frozen food industry to ensure that pizza and chips would still be available for school lunches.

In addition the bill will:

• Block the Agriculture Department from limiting starchy vegetables, including corn and peas, to two servings a week. The rule was intended to cut down on french fries, which many schools serve daily.
• Allow USDA to count two tablespoons of tomato paste as a vegetable - which allows pizza to be counted as a serve of vegetables. Federally subsidized lunches must have a certain number of vegetables to be served.

The intervention and lobbying by the fast-food industry to undermine the science-based public policy making of the USDA is yet another example of the increasing trend to privatise public policy making.

Interest groups and lobbyists have disproportionate sway over lawmaking, and in some cases have been able to  get lawmakers to completely abrogate their responsibility to legislate in areas of public policy. So much so that areas that were once the purview of government are now almost purely regulated and enforced by private interests.

This is particularly the case in intellectual property (IP) policy, where industry lobby groups have monopolised the public debate so that they virtually write the legislation for lawmakers to pass.

The recent "Stop Online Piracy" (SOPA) bill is one such example. The bill, if made into law, would give content publishers unprecedented powers to censor and control the publication of online content - making the content  publishers ultimate arbiters of what can be published on the internet. Through laws such as these, Governments have bestowed arbitrary quasi-judicial powers upon powerful interests, removing requirements for due process, natural justice or evidentiary rules - thus shirking their responsibilities to legislate public policy or protect the public interest.

The powers that the bill confers have been likened to the powers that the Chinese government executes over internet content through the "Great Firewall" albeit that the Western version is executed by private, rather than government interests. However, like the Chinese Firewall, the public can not dismantle this policy by excercising their democratic powers - the interests of this private plutocracy are just as dictatorial and totalitatarian as the Chinese Government.

In Australia too, the government has abrogated its responsibility to the public on IP policy by signing up to secretly negotiated "free-trade" treaties such as the Trans-pacific partnership.  The government is also refusing to take a leadership role in regulating IP infringement on the internet - preferring to hand that process over to vested interests in the ISP and content publishing industries rather than legislating in such a way that provides a balance between industry interests and the public interest.

The pervasiveness of the ideology that advocates that public policy is best executed by private interests relegates lawmaking to mere administration and democratic power to tinkering around the edges of issues. 

This abrogation of public policy making by lawmakers has not only had a chilling effect on the rights and freedoms of people, but it has also had serious effects on the world economy (global financial crisis), environment (climate change) and public health and wellbeing (health policy). However, lawmakers are satisfied to leave these important issues up to private interests instead of providing political leadership in the public interest and when a government does try to allow its citizenry to have a say, it is loudly shouted down and decried by those powerful interests to which an appeal to democracy would disadvantage the most.

Various governments have handed over some of the most important areas of public policy to powerful private interests to varying degrees. The economy, the environment, public health and culture have all been privatised to varying extents.

The virtual privatisation of these areas of public policy has collectively given society the global financial crisis by handing the economy to bankers, global warming by acquiescing to industrialist interests, a global obesity epidemic by pandering to the fast-food industry, lack of access to drugs in developing countries by granting broad patents to pharmaceutical companies and limitations on free speech and  human creativity by the over-regulation of IP.

And as we complain about our politicians tinkering around the edges of what was democracy, at least we can drown ourselves in the vacuity of culture that is left to us by the plutocrats and reach for another slice of pizza.

Well, at least it's a vegetable.

Ignorance powers the climate change debate

The recent furore over Cate Blanchett appearing in an ad [video] supporting climate change has highlighted the strong current of anti-intellectualism that is driving the carbon pricing debate. The opposition has shown itself all too keen to pander to Australia's inherent cultural cringe to brand celebrities, economists, and scientists who support a carbon price as elitist and out of touch. It is interesting to note that it was Blanchett that garnered all of the criticism and not Michael Caton, an actor more associated with "ordinary Australians" through his roles in "The Castle" and "Packed to the Rafters". The reason for this is to play into the narrative that the opposition is trying to build around an "elitism" that is supposedly at the heart of carbon pricing.

This characterisation of the debate as an "us and them" rather than a debate about ideas is a hallmark of the tea-party style politics that have become such a feature of the rhetoric of the right. This dichotomy between "us" the ordinary citizen and "them" the intellectual elitist is the very building block of the astroturfing "movements" that are built up by powerful interests who are happy to stand behind and manipulate these so-called people's movements to further their own corporate interests. The involvement of Koch Industries in undermining climate science and engineering the "debate" both by manipulating the right-wing media and by funding the Tea Party in America is well documented but in Australia we are only just beginning to see the rise of a similar model of politics.

Combined with the new activism of large corporate interests in the mining industry, the rhetoric by the opposition and its News Ltd. cheerleaders is straying dangerously close to that of the Tea Party - building the dynamic of "us and them" that is so characteristic of tea-party politics.

The Government has not helped itself in this regard. Its inability to disassociate itself from the "elitism" narrative, built in some part by the intellectual Kevin Rudd, has fed into the anti-intellectual narrative. This was highlighted almost comically in the debate over the Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) on mining. The miners ad depicted an "ordinary" mine-worker talking to "ordinary Australians" about issues to which they could relate. Compare that with the Government's ad set in a lecture theatre, the very epitome of "academic elitism". Feeding this narrative that has carefully been built up by the opposition and its powerful allies effectively devastated the government's reforms.

The opposition effectively builds this anti-intellectual narrative with its simplistic sloganeering and cheap politics. Distilling every argument down to its simplistic "us and them" dichotomy, eschewing debate. It is combined with careful dog-whistling to the extreme right to assure them that whatever policies they do actually put forward are always done with a wink and a nod to the extremes.

This unhelpful narrative undermines the whole public policy process, but then it is the opposition's goal to reduce every debate to sloganeering. The opposition doesn't even try to engage in the policy debate, barely selling their own alternative "direct action" plan as it is their intention to merely frame any debate regardless of its content into an "us vs. them" slanging match. This charactisation of the debate away from actual policy to the "us and them" rhetoric enables the seemingly hypocritical attack on Blanchett for her wealth and elite status while praising the even more wealthy Gina Rinehart. The narrative paints Rinehart as the "down to earth mine worker" and Blanchett as the "elitist intellectual".

The building of the anti-intellectual narrative is what has leads to the more unhinged types resorting to making death threats and engaging in campaigns of bullying against scientists doing their research. Even though those that build the narrative would seek to deny the connection.

The dangerous narrative is of little concern to the activist corporate interests. It is important to them that debates are reduced to dichotomies of "us and them" as it makes it easier for them to mobilise astroturf anti-intellectual movements against those which would seek to limit their power. It enables them to excuse their own hypocrisy, shut down debate and mobilise their astroturf campaigns with their cries of "out of touch elite". Anti-intellectualism is a powerful force which tea party politics has harnessed both here and in the US and it has been ruthlessly exploited by the new right.

"Ignorance is Strength"

"Carbon Dioxide is essential to life": the stupidest anti-carbon tax argument

During the recent debates on carbon pricing, the opposition has more closely aligned itself with those that ague that global warming is not man-made. Tony Abbott has even reflected these views in various recent statements, including buying into what is quite possibly the stupidest argument against anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the carbon price. Abbott said that carbon dioxide is not a proven "environmental villain", which echoes the comments frequently stated by AGW-denialists that carbon dioxide is somehow not a problem because it is "essential to life".

This is quite possibly the stupidest argument against AGW and carbon pricing - there are plenty of other elements and gases that are "essential to life" that are pollutants and are priced and regulated.

Just to take one of them: sulphur. Sulphur is an important trace element that is required by the body for the manufacture of amino acids. It is also a component of many preservatives (particularly in wine). So it could be said that sulphur is essential to life.

However, like carbon, human activity has greatly changed the natural sulphur cycle which has resulted in the atmospheric concentration of sulphur increasing. This has had serious environmental impacts - the most striking of which is acid rain.

To tackle the problem of acid rain governments have used international treaties and a successful emissions trading scheme - sound familiar?

Saying that because carbon dioxide is "essential to life" it can not also be a pollutant is a completely spurious argument, and if we look at the regulation of another element that is also "essential to life", sulphur, we see a similar model to tackling the problem that we have seen proposed for carbon dioxide.

Carbon pricing: The really simple explanation

I've really, really simplified this and used an 'ideal' model but the principles are the same and it will serve for comparative purposes.

Assume that both Company A and Company B produced widgets at $10 retail. The widgets are identical - apart from their production method.

Assume that the most efficient carbon use for the production of widgets is 1 unit of carbon.

First, let's examine the effect of a carbon price:

Assume 1 unit of carbon is priced at $1

Company A makes a widget that takes 10 units of carbon and pays the carbon price of $10 for its widget which now retails at $20 (the original $10 plus the carbon price).

Company B uses a less carbon intensive method to produce its widgets which only take 1 unit of carbon and pays the carbon price of $1 for its widget which it can retail at $11.

All of the money that the government collects from the price on carbon is used for compensating consumers - let's assume that the redistribution is $1 per person in compensation. All of this compensation coming from the price on carbon and not from the budget. This is important because things that are paid for out of the budget have to be funded by one of three things: tax, cuts or borrowing (deficit)

Now, our average consumer is used to paying the non-carbon priced price of $10 for their widget. They have received $1 in compensation for the government so they now have a potential spend of $11 for widgets.

Now if they buy the $11 widget they are no more worse off than before the carbon price and Company A has a rather imperative reason to reduce the price of their widget - for example, by reducing its carbon use.

Now let's look at "direct action" aka a carbon reduction subsidy:

Direct action pays polluters to reduce their carbon use.

Company A requires $100 in capital costs (with a $20 p.a subsidy to keep their carbon use at this level) to change its production process to bring its carbon use down to the ideal 1 unit of carbon. These costs are now subsidised by the government (funded from either tax, borrowings or cuts).

Now Company A is not going to pass the subsidy to the consumer because its going to use the money in its carbon reduction scheme - we might get a few dollars handed on, but essentially subsidies don't significantly reduce prices (they might decrease the rate of price increases but one only needs to look at subsidies for private schools to see this not working).

Company B doesn't need any money to bring it to its peak efficiency of 1 unit of carbon.

So at the supermarket both Company A and Company B's products still cost $10 - except that, thanks to the fact that there is no price signalling to the consumer, the consumer has no way of knowing that Company A's widget cost the budget bottom line $100 with a recurrent budgetary cost of $20 p.a.

Direct action is expensive. It either means cuts, taxes or borrowing, there's no way around it. And no amount of bleating about "great big new taxes" by the opposition is going to change this economic reality.

So next time you hear the opposition going on about "direct action" ask yourself: "how much are they going to borrow?", "what are they going to tax?" or  more likely, "what are they going to cut?"