Category Archives: Big picture

Something unexpected

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Teaspoon of soilHere is an interesting situation, almost unimaginable.

You are approaching your 60th birthday and are about to be surprised by an unexpected inheritance from a wealthy relative that you barely remember.

Many years ago your great Aunt, who was always rather odd, left you some money.

She stipulated that you could only access the balance of the funds when you are 60 years old, 40 years on from when the money was deposited.

The good news is that the initial capital she left was $10 million, a huge sum even if nobody quite knew how she came to be so wealthy. The bad news is that the $10 million capital has lost value to the tune of 1.3% a year.

Bummer. Not only did you have to wait to be rich, but also each year there were 1.3% fewer funds. Still, in a few months time when you reach 60 there will be a bank cheque for $6 million in the post, more than enough for a world cruise or two and a luxurious retirement.

Your younger brother was less fortunate. The dowager only bequeathed $1 million to him under the same rules. He has to wait longer for his funds and gets a much smaller cheque of $593,000.

A tidy sum for sure but not quite enough to fund his retirement.

Your three cousins, who soon found out about the unexpected inheritance, were also hoping for something from this distant relative that they only just realized they had. Sure enough, she did not forget them and deposited $100,000 each for when they reach their 60th birthday. They get $59,250 — certainly better than a kick in the teeth but hardly a pension fund.

On the first of your world cruises you mull over the odd situation of financial capital failing to appreciate.

What if your retirement savings, that before your great slice of luck were your only means of support in old age, were being eroded at 1.3% a year?

Each year the amount you had saved up went down a bit, not much admittedly but it went down. Likely you would seek to reinvest your capital quick smart rather than run the risk of not having enough funds for your retirement. Also likely you would fire your investment analyst and rant at everyone you could, looking for a scapegoat for such a fundamental error.

And what bad news it was for your brother. If he had known about that $1 million all those years ago and invested it wisely he would have more money than you right now.

As you sip a G&T on the sundeck you can’t help thinking it funny what we take for granted.

 

Another unexpected thing

Soil scientists have estimated that the amount of carbon in agricultural soils in Australia has declined by 51% in the last 40 years — that is 1.3% a year.

Soil carbon is a critical environmental asset that drives plant growth because carbon fuels soil biological activity, promotes soil structure, aids infiltration and moisture retention and supports nutrient exchange. Handy material to have and not something to be squandered.

What is worse is that science has little idea about the initial carbon stocks [the capital]. It might have been the equivalent of $10 million in which case we can keep going for a while.

We might even have time to reinvest by adopting smart agricultural practices and get the capital to appreciate again.

The worry is that we may be as uninformed and as poorly off as your cousins.

 

Here is the original scientific reference for loss of soil carbon [you can find a copy on Google Scholar]:

Zhongkui Luo, Enli Wang, & Osbert Jianxin Sun (2010) Soil carbon change and its responses to agricultural practices in Australian agro-ecosystems: A review and synthesis. Geoderma 155 (2010) 211–223.

 

And some more articles on soil carbon

Carbon in Soil – Why Organic Carbon is So Important

Soil – the missing carbon sink

The elephant in the bathroom may have farted

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elephant02Well it would seem that somebody close to the policy makers might have noticed the elephant in the bathroom.

This week an article in the Financial Review talked of a carbon tax budget hole that could be $4 billion deep thanks to a carbon price that might not continue to rise after the fixed price period after all.

Blind Freddie can’t help but chuckle and the elephant’s stomach rumbles with contentment.

It seems that there has been some new modeling of the carbon price beyond the fixed price period on behalf of Australia’s Climate Change Authority. The numbers suggest a “fall from July 2015 to $10.72 a tonne”.

This should be no surprise given the current European market prices are hovering around $5 tCO2e — this difference from $23 per tCO2e and rising to the reality of current market price is the elephant standing quietly next to the bassinette.

Now if you are a government that has been struggling to get the balance sheet back in the black because it was one of the core things you promised to do, then $4 billion less revenue is a problem. Especially given that the carbon price policy was hugely unpopular in the first place and will continue to give you trouble in an election year.

If it was just a revenue shortfall [$10 instead of $23+ per tCO2e] that probably wouldn’t be too bad. Only the revenue is already either spent or committed, mainly to ease the pain for exposed industries and for consumers, making a market price dip in 2015 a double whammy.

Awkward for the Australian government but stayers among carbon traders in Europe are not too worried. The say it is just what markets do, they will show price volatility around long-term trends. And just now the price is low. Later it will rise again, not least because this is a regulated market designed specifically to manipulate credit supply to raise the price and reduce demand. Like all markets, success comes from the long play.

Then there is another thing that the elephant symbolizes.

Remember that the carbon price is for a permit to emit and fewer permits purchased mean fewer carbon emissions. This was the policy objective: to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by making it more expensive to emit than the alternatives.

And as President Obama brings action on climate change to the State of the Union address, it will be hard to ditch the policy now. So here are a couple of options given we can see the elephant.

Ostrich option | Bury the report or, if the electorate cotton on, spin it like a fury.

After all 2015 is a long way off. There is plenty of time for anything to happen, perhaps even something positive. Remind yourself of the positivity of the ballsy carbon traders and wait. In the meantime, do whatever is possible to make the whole thing go away.

Be a honey badger | take hold of the policy, believe in it and shake it hard.

The idea of a carbon price was that it should deliver behavior change and make Australia less carbon intensive.  So embrace that and with the tenacity of a honey badger stick with it. Allow an aggressive permit allocation limit, ease the coupling to the EU carbon market by changing the proportion of credits emitters can source from overseas and explain why to consumers. There is no reason that the domestic market cannot have a higher carbon price than elsewhere other than the fear of ceding competitive advantage.

In short, show leadership.

Now there is a thing.

Dangerously quiet

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King Parrot, NSWIt has been 23 months since the NSW Labour government left office after more than 16 years in power.

Normally when a left leaning administration is replaced by a right leaning one the inevitable shift in attitude to nature and natural resources would galvanize the environmental movement.

When hard won conservation legislation, planning rules and funding for environmental management are chipped away there might be an objection, some resistance, or at least some verbal argument. Only there has been very little noise.

No great shouts against the inching away from protection — not even allowing shooting in national parks seemed to get a reaction.

Only the nationally significant issue of coal seam gas, particularly how it will be extracted and the possible impact on farmers, seems to have stirred the pot.

Regular readers will know that alloporus is not overtly green — a regular guy who owns a car, takes plane rides, watches a plasma TV and wrote a book called “Awkward news for Greenies” has little moral ground to claim great environmental advocacy. Yet this quiet is eerie — makes you wonder.

Is it the calm before the storm, the tirade that must hit when the environment is no longer considered?

Or is it something else? Perhaps there is no energy left. It could be that the era of loud advocacy has passed. Maybe the malaise of personal entitlement has swept across us all, even the card-carrying activists.

If it has then we have a problem. Whilst screaming from greenies is about as welcome as a crying baby in the quiet carriage of the commuter train, it performs a vital function.

It keeps the b—-ds honest

And when all that goes quiet it is dangerous for us all.

Paying more for food

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

As regular readers of alloporus will know, posts on food appear quite often on this blog.

Not new recipes for banoffee pie [can be too bananary] or salted caramel tart [delicious with just the right amount of salt] but more about how we are going to consistently grow enough of food to feed the growing and increasingly fussy global human population, not to mention their pets.

Food security | A food security challenge | What we eat

Recently I asked a question in my confused Confucius series on the article site Hubpages to see if food security was something people thought about.

Being confused Confucius the question was just a tad lateral: Would you be prepared to pay more for your food if it meant food supply was secure? [The link takes you to the answers and comments] and there is also a summary Hub

Turns out that there were three main objections

  1. Could not pay more because it was already a struggle to cover the food bill
  2. Paying more would not solve anything
  3. We already pay

Social media is a great tool to canvas opinion but, unlike answers to exam questions from my long-suffering undergraduates, answers to questions are often oblique.

Not being able to pay is fair enough and no doubt very real for many people all around the world.

Paying more not solving anything did not really answer the question by making the assumption that it was not possible to pay for security. Bit of a dodge I think and quite common I suspect in our thinking. We jump onto the polemic in order to avoid searching ourselves for what we truly think.

The ‘we already pay’ because our production system is riddled with externalities, also didn’t really answer the question.

I guess all I was asking is if we would pay to be secure, pay more for our current food to know that we would always have enough food in the future.

So far the answer seems to be either ‘no’ or ‘not something I want to answer thanks’. This I find both curious and just a little disturbing.

Obama wins

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President Obama is returned to office, quite comfortably in the end; only he looked anything but comfortable.

The oratory in the Presidents victory speech was familiar, right down to the repetition of phrases and anecdotes that have worked well for him many times before. Only they seemed out of place and at odds with his countenance. That slim youthfulness wears the strains of office and endless campaigning easily, but there was no joy in him. It felt like the passion had gone, drained away by four years of political reality.

Obama couldn’t arouse the faithful with a “let’s finish what we started” message because not much has started and what was finished [Obamacare] turned out not to be as popular as it should have been. Best he could do through the first term was to hose down fires with no surety that they would go out [jobs, deficit, war].

You could see it all  in his speech. All the issues that he really wanted to speak about truthfully but couldn’t mention replaced with things he had to say but only half believed.

Nothing about reigning in the banks and the profit driven end of town.

Nothing about deficit being debt and that debt can readily become living beyond your means.

Nothing about how war might start out as an economic stimulus but over time is crippling to both treasury and psyche.

Nothing to say about the idea that incomes may not always need to rise for voters to be happy.

Obama did say thank you because he is a polite man and was clearly grateful for avoiding failure. He didn’t manage to inspire hope and didn’t look like he was invigorated to start anew. And this is a pity because the only way to tackle those unmentionables is head on making sure to bring the people with you.

There is still a chance because hope never dies, even if in Obama it seems to have been drained and jaded by the magnitude of the task.

Leadership really is a tough gig in a modern world of individual entitlement.

The last loaf of bread

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Consider the situation if this delicious crusty loaf was the only one on the planet.

More than that, it is the very last loaf of bread there will ever be.

After thousands of years of grinding grains into flour, adding yeast, a little salt and some water, kneading the mixture and applying some heat, the making of bread has stopped. And this loaf is now the last of its kind.

What would you do?

What should you do?

A while ago I wrote a story about Joe who was prescient enough to realize that he had this very conundrum.

You can download Joe’s story from the free downloads page of my Climate-change-wisdom site.

If you like it, why not download my ebook Stories for a change to read some more adventures and anecdotes that will tweak your environmental imagination.

You can get a copy in your preferred ebook format at Smashwords for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Because we can

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Neil Armstrong, the first man to put a space boot and plant a flag on the moon passed away a couple of weeks ago. Many around the world gave a mental nod in remembrance and respect, and rightly so.

Notable for not cashing in on his deserved fame, Armstrong was a modest man who achieved great things. When you realize that the team that put him on the moon did it on less computer grunt than you have in your smartphone, getting to the moon and back was a display of remarkable courage and ingenuity.

One of the media eulogies to Armstrong played part of a speech by President Kennedy made around the time of the space program. There was great passion and determination in the President’s voice that said we will go to the moon. And we will go there simply because we can. Nothing about technology advancement, commercial spinoffs or even the political capital that such an undertaking would generate. It was just a big, audacious goal.

Of course there was political mileage to be had in a time of cold war competition with the Soviets. It was also a time when the nascent power of the capitalist system that America believed was the only way forward, needed some iconic acts to further cement its worth.

Only President Kennedy sounded pure in his desire. We will go to the moon because we can. It was an empowering position, one that allowed Armstrong and the brave folk that followed to show their courage and tenacity to the world. And in Armstrong’s case made great by his manner and modesty.

I suspect that as a species we need this kind of thing. Our brains have evolved to handle complexity and we are always on the lookout for something big to fix. Only lately it has been more about drama that dreams.

What chance a modern day political leader making a Kennedy style speech? Miniscule I suspect. Just think, a president or prime minister leaving on the table the specific issues of the day to imagine something way beyond the mundane; something that inspires us to think, even for a moment, about more than ourselves. Hard isn’t it?

Maybe modern leaders do not understand that people like a collective ambition. We warm to big possibilities that take us further than our personal goals. We actually like the idea that there is something more than our own desire for a house with a white picket fence.

Or maybe the world has changed so much that audacious goals that have a collective outcome really are now out of reach. People found it easy enough to believe Kennedy. Today the hugeness of just keeping the global economy alive seems audacious as economies teeter and the global population grows. A leader with ideas not focused squarely on the drama receives short shrift.

But we need dreams too. And not just those that say we can fix global warming, end poverty and provide everyone with quality healthcare. We need audacity.

What is the next “because we can”?

Policies on the scrap heap

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alloporus has been a place where the topic of leadership has popped up consistently.

It is after all an intrinsically fascinating topic [leaders not heroes] but mostly it gets a mention because of the leadership vacuum in the political life of Australia [Wot, no politics | Leadership is tricky | Labour leaders].

An insightful article in the News Review section of the Sydney Morning Herald by Miriam Lyons, executive director of the Centre for Policy Development based in Sydney, showed what a lack of leadership could mean. Her idea, presented in a neat analogy with fantasy football, was that there have been many policies proposed by politicians that would be laughed at by their parties if presented to the current parliament.

The best one for me was Andrew Peacock who, as shadow environment minister, went to the 1990 election proposing a 20% cut in GHG emissions. The Liberals didn’t win. When they did, in 1996 under John Howard, there followed a decade of keeping well away from emission targets and ignoring the Kyoto protocol completely. Today such a target would be preposterous.

Lyons point was that policies are fickle things, easily left behind when the mood of the day makes them unpalatable. And that many a good idea languishes even when international moves are in favour.

In Australia the trend for rejection seems to have become so severe that there are few policy ideas left standing.

Except that policy is core business for politicians. We entrust our elected members to discuss, debate and land at the right balance between our personal freedom and the necessary efficiencies from the collective. And we allow them a small army of staffers to figure out and implement all the rules, regulations and incentives that chosen policy requires.

So why, when I read the list of policy options now considered laughable, do I cry?

I despair because all of those policies once proposed by parties from all persuasions but now on the scrap heap contain a kernel of leadership. Each one of them was just a little bit out there, sufficiently different to be on the edge. Their proponents needed to be bold and took a risk in putting them up because there was a chance that the policy would be unpopular.

And this is partly why they were cast aside, for on the edge can also be on the nose. It is easy then to retreat into the entrenched assumption that the public will bite you if you present unpopular policy.

But is this true?

Like Lyons, I don’t think so. Unpopular policy can easily become popular if it works. That is if it delivers balance on the public and private interest. But it needs to be told and sold, and that takes courage or, dare we say it, leadership.

Astonishing

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ImageImagine a Manchester United supporter on a commuter train to work. He sits next to a random person and, for once, starts a conversation. Turns out that the fellow passenger is a Manchester City supporter.

Outside the emotional pressure cooker of match day the exchange is civil.

Even though United are on a poor run of form and are trailing in the league, neither fan gives an inch. They spend a competitive half an hour talking up the virtues of everything from the merits of their best players to the quality of the meat pies at the grounds.

This is what we do when we declare our support… we support, talk up, cheer our team however lowly or troubled it may be at the time.

Maybe I am naive but I thought that a similar responsibility befell senior politicians when it came to talking about their jurisdiction.

So I nearly fell of my chair yesterday when on the radio was a recording of the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard complaining about transit times and departure congestion at Sydney airport. Every business traveller will tell you stories of long delays, she said.

What! Can you ever imagine a United supporter saying that Sir Alex is a bit slack, “came in late for work yesterday he did”? Or hear the City fan suggest that Balotelli should be dropped from the squad. Never, not in a million years.

The back story to the Gillard harangue was that the G20 leaders summit in 2014 was to be held in Brisbane and not Sydney, a choice made by the government for either political gain (the preferred media spin) or because the Sydney Convention Centre was scheduled for refurbishment and unavailable (a practical explanation not favourable to spin). Or maybe they just wanted to spread it around.

Whatever the real reason, the Prime Minister chose to claim airport inefficiency as her sound bite for why it was Brisbane over Sydney.

What a crazy call. Whatever your political motivation you don’t bag out your own team. In fact, I would say that Gillard, who has a loud public voice because of her position, was being irresponsible. She should be talking up Australia in every day in every way. It is in her job description.

If the Australian people ignore such gaffs and her inability to see the consequences of them and re-elect her to office, I reckon she would be one lucky lady.

And as a United supporter, I also hope and pray that she supports City.

Food security | What’s wrong with this ad?

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Check out this ad snapped on a recent rip to the local supermarket.

A handsome, young bloke stands with his arms wide to embrace his achievement, another nutritious crop of vegetables for the table. Good on him you think. A warm feeling creeps up on you as though you are being wrapped in a safety blanket. Thanks to strong dudes like this one, I know I am going to be fed with healthy nutritious food.

No doubt the ad, that also appeared as a full page spread in the Sunday magazines, would have cost several hundred thousand dollars to run has nothing much to do with bok choy, or even fresh vegetables for that matter.

It is all about putting the retailer front and centre.

By showing the farmer as a member of the team we are being made to think that our food comes from the supermarket and not the paddock. The retailer is now the supplier.

The messaging appears to be about fresh food, from local farms grown by young and, dare I say, virile farmers who may be in search of a wife. But really it is about the retailer being the source of our food security.

So what is wrong with this particular ad beyond the obvious sexism?

Here is a hint. I purchased the weekend paper in the supermarket and not far from the newspaper stand was a special in the vegetable isle: a net of onions for $1.

That is pristine, firm onions for 15c each.

Good food at great prices. It’s enough to close down the agencies on Madison Avenue. Who needs advertising when the prices are this cheap and the produce so enticing?

The reality is that farmers cannot supply produce sold out of the supermarket at 15c unless they are selling to one buyer who runs a monopoly over them. What is wrong is that the smiling farmer is actually walking a tightrope of viability. If fertilizer prices rise by 20% then they go out of business.

The market is failing them.

The profiteering opportunities and perverse competition of a retail duopoly (two supermarket chains supply most of the food to households across the country) creates huge risks for Australian production systems. Running at the price margin is a challenging way to run any business but in farming the corner cutting and frugality it severely limits sustainability.

It is well known that farmers look after their land best when they are doing well. When they are under pressure they tend to push the land harder to make ends meet.  We are at the point globally where we cannot afford for such structural risk. We need every acre of productive land to produce and to remain productive.

The message of food security provided by your friendly supermarket is false. It fails to take into account the risk that the farmer takes on when he has only one buyer of his produce.

And another thing, most farmers are over 50.