Archive for September, 2024

Dutton: energy and economy again

September 27, 2024

It is worthwhile starting this description by repeating the slogan, that if an energy transition does not reduce emissions, then it is not worth doing. Even if its cheap and innovative.

In a previous blog, I have tried to demonstrate that Peter Dutton has made a major mistake by saying that “energy is the economy”, and ignoring all the other factors that make the economy.

Dutton also seems to point to a major weakness in his own nuclear argument saying:

The Coalition’s energy policy is the only plan for cheaper, cleaner and consistent energy.

This is an odd argument to make when many people have pointed out the problems with this:

  • There is no costing of nuclear energy being given by Dutton and his party at all. This implies they do not know for sure it is cheaper.
  • They merely assert it must be less costly than renewables.
  • However, we have costings for Renewables from reputable sources that insist they are cheaper than nukes [1], [2], [3, 4] and costs of Renewables has been decreasing.
  • In the last 20 or so years the costs of nuclear have regularly turned out to be much greater than the builders estimated. Some projects have been discontinued because of this unexpected extra cost, and there can be no guarantee that the next set of projections will not be under-estimates as well.
  • This greater than expected cost requires an increased the price of electricity to pay the extra cost back.
  • Claims of cheapness are merely optimism about nuclear and pessimism about everything else.
  • There are people and companies wanting to build renewables, but Dutton claims that nuclear will have to be paid for by the taxpayers. Any mistakes or bad planning will be costs to taxpayers and there is no competition.
  • There is no evidence that any private enterprise is even vaguely interested in taking on the costs and dangers of building.
  • Then, we are trying to build at least 7-14 reactors at the same time. Just as large amounts of normal building cause price increases due to materials and labour shortages, so we can expect such increases from building reactors simultaneously. The only countries with experience of building large numbers of reactors together, at the moment, are China and Russia, and it is probably unlikely that Australians wish to entangle their energy future with either of those countries.
  • Nuclear also has ongoing costs, not just of keeping complicated systems functional and avoiding fat tail accidents, but of mining, fuel provision, transport and waste disposal.

More importantly, Dutton ignores the time factor:

  • He makes a big deal of energy costs now (which is high all over the world for many reasons) but nuclear energy would not arrive for at least 15 years (at the very best) and time of construction blow outs seem normal, given other people’s experience, so its likely to be later still.
  • Therefore, even in the unlikely event nuclear reactors will provide cheap energy, this cheapness is hardly going to relieve price issues now.
  • We don’t know how long any particular nuclear reactor can exist before the probability of danger overwhelms the probability of benefit. He is estimating 80 years. That is not 80 years of continual action as they need servicing, and at the end of life the cost of decommissioning is usually very expensive and takes a long time. These costs should be factored into the upfront costs rather than being ignored.
  • Without increasing immediate emissions-reducing power, like renewables, then nuclear will not help reduce emissions, because fossil fuels will have to be used to make up the decline in energy supply as coal phases out. If we don’t start reducing emissions now, then they will accumulate and make climate change worse.

Dutton also ignores the systemic nature of energy.

  • Even 16 nuclear energy sources will make up a small part of the system, especially by the time they are built, unless we reduce energy usage significantly.
  • Because they are a small part of the system, even if they were incredibly cheap, it is probably unlikely they will reduce energy prices.
  • If Australia expands its energy consumption, which is pretty likely, then it almost certainly will need more cabling, even if the nuclear stations use the old coal wires. So one of his arguments for cheapness is likely to be wrong, and the idea that no new cables will be needed shows the inability of the Coalition to look at the system as a whole.

So given this nuclear program is unlikely to reduce emissions, or produce cheaper electricity for a long time, if ever, the main plan for justification is to attack renewables and contemporary prices.

Prices only slowly rose under the Coalition and are massively expensive under Labor. This could be true, but its easy to keep electricity prices even, if you are not doing anything at all to reduce emissions, and think that increasing emissions is actually ok because you deny climate change. He adds to alarm.

The Albanese Government has us on a path towards the hollowing-out of industry and business in our country….. And it’s all because a weak Prime Minister is making decisions aimed at stopping Labor voters defecting to the Greens.,… Labor’s energy policy train wreck is only making it more vital that we include nuclear.

I don’t think anyone with any political awareness, could seriously think Labor is trying to take over Green’s policies. But it does seem from this, that Dutton’s arguments depend on exaggerated rhetoric

Nowhere in the world has a renewables-only policy worked.

This may be true, although people disagree, South Australia will likely shortly become mainly renewables with some gas firming, but no one, certainly not the Labor party is aiming for a Renewables only policy. The question is whether nuclear is the best form of emissions reduction.

He argues:

Germany too has invested heavily in renewables.

Wind and solar account for more than 30 per cent of its mix. But when Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off gas supplies to Europe, Germany was left in a precarious position. It ramped-up its coal-fired power generation.

This shows what many people have said previously, that Germany’s energiewende depended way too heavily on coal, lignite and gas (partly because it did phase out nuclear and energy corporations went for the cheaper and more profitable option of heavily polluting lignite), and Germany should never have made the decision to depend on overseas supplied gas, especially from Russia. However, since then Germany has attempted to boost its Renewable Capacity. It is certainly not going back to nuclear.

As we said earlier the point of the energy transition is not cheapness, although renewables seem cheaper than nuclear, it is emissions reduction. This is almost the only thing that counts. But of course the Coalition use the well known drug dealers defense – ‘We sell good drugs’ – as

[products] will be produced in other countries with weaker environmental standards than Australia.

One interesting part of this speech is that Dutton is almost claiming that nuclear can work with renewables,

The Coalition… sees renewables and nuclear as companions – not competitors, as Labor does.

rather than repeating his earlier position that large-scale renewables will be suppressed and fossil fuels increased to make up for the suppression. How far we can trust this really is a change of anything other than camouflage is uncertain.

The other argument he makes is that renewables are unpopular.

From Bunbury on the west coast to Port Stephens on the east coast, furious residents are protesting offshore wind farms due to their impacts on fishing, tourism and livelihoods….In February and September, farmers flocked to Canberra to rally against the roll-out of industrial scale renewables and transmission lines on their prime agricultural land.

It is correct that there is resistance to wind (in particular), although much of it seems to be about neoliberal implementation practices and lack of consultation or explanation. However there is a political force and encouragement over these protests from the Coalition and from oil company think tanks, and the Coalition, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not interested in encouraging dissent against offshore or onshore mining, that could destroy bore water supplies harm fishing, tourism and so on. Dutton has previously made clear that no protest will be acceptable over nuclear because of “national interest”.

The question arises could Australia use nuclear energy? The answer is clearly yes, but it has to be done along with increasing renewable energy. OR emissions will not decrease, and money is being thrown away for nothing.

By itself nuclear is just expensive and slow to get up. It will need subsidies, if power is to remain cheap and available, whatever the Coalition argue.

There is no point in building 7 nukes, that will almost certainly not produce enough energy to make a difference.

Nuclear is also experimental in the sense that we do not know what will happen when a country with no nuclear power plants tries to build 14 or so at the same time.

More importantly than providing baseload, we need to deal with the problem that large scale solar will produce massive amounts of excess energy which has to be stored. Storage is the number one problem for emissions reduction. If we get enough storage then we might not need ‘baseload.’ However it is also correct we do not know if this is possible at the moment, it just looks probable.

Any kind of transition which actually lowers emissions will be costly, that includes nuclear. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. This possible dishonesty is especially marked when the Coalition have not produced any costings and have simply denied everyone else’s costings with no evidence. Saying that they:

will release our costings in due course – at a time of our choosing. Not at Chris Bowen’s or Anthony Albanese’s choosing – but our choosing

simply implies their costings have been difficult at best, or they want to make sure these costings are not open to long, careful criticism.

Dutton concludes:

Let me conclude on this point; we can’t switch nuclear power on tomorrow – even if the ban is lifted.

Like other countries, we need to ramp-up domestic gas production in the more immediate term to get power prices down and restore stability to our grid.

I think that statement renders the position clear, For the Coalition, nuclear functions to increase emissions now and, likely, forever. Presumably we don’t challenge petrol for cars either. There is no talk of the electrification of everything, or of reducing emissions from other sources. The aim seems to be to keep fossil fuels burning and emissions up.

If there is, as he claims, something visionary about this plan, it is spending lots of money, not changing and everything being ok, probably because climate change is unreal and fossil fuel company profits must be maintained.

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‘Historical Materialism’

September 26, 2024

This is a (hopefully) fairly simple explanation, rather than the full deal, and like most simplifications probably has major failings

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is the theory that history is primarily driven by material forces rather than by ideas or ‘great men.’ The theory that history is the working out of ideas alone can often be called something like ‘historical idealism’

Marxism asserts Ideas arise out of the human conditions of life and are generally spread by ‘class representatives’. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. The ideas of the ruling classes get promoted and distributed, whereas other ideas tend to be persecuted or ignored. However, in conditions in which the ruling class is destroying itself, or a new class is rising, alternative ideas can arise out of existing class conflict. Hence Marxism itself was supposed to be able to challenge capitalist ideology, through the rise of the working class and through expressing their understandings and experience of life.

It seems to have failed dismally as, nowadays, most people have no idea what Marxism stands for or argues, they simply know what their rulers and the rulers’ representatives tell them about it 🙂

Important factors in history

Important factors in material history include the ways that people gain survival through the “organization of the means of production.” So the fundamental questions for a Marxist are:

  • How do societies produce food and other products?
  • How do they distribute or trade food and other products?
  • What groups of people does this organization allocate control over the distribution?
  • Who does the system allow to accumulate more than other people?
  • How is this inequality preserved?
  • How does this organization protect itself and enforce itself?
  • How does this organization undermine or destroy itself? These ways of self-destruction are usually called “contradictions.” Marxism implies that contradictions are binary (the “dialectic” because of Hegel :), but there is no reason to assume this is correct. Contradictions could involve multiple forces acting at the same time.

In capitalism, capitalists (deliberately?) confuse capitalism with exchange and trade, which are universal. For Marxists capitalism is a particular set of forms of organization of production, technology, labor, trade, distribution, allocation of prosperity, power and so on. Capitalism is not trade in itself. Otherwise bureaucratic state communism would have to be classified as capitalism, which is not useful, even if both are oppressive in often different ways.

Example: the history of capitalism

The capitalist idea of history is that people become rich because they, or their ancestors, worked hard, were virtuous or brilliant having great ideas. This set of ‘ideologies’ (ideas justifying a particular social organization) feels right to capitalists and makes capitalism ‘good’ which is pleasing to them. It is well known and well distributed. Every American, Britisher, European, Australian has probably heard this ideology repeated over and over until it sounds like common-sense.

Marxists would tend to argue that capitalism arose through violent theft of land by those in power (aristocrats), and through expansion of the aristocracy in the UK to include people who owed their wealth directly to the crown through services they performed. Many of these people used that land to accumulate capital, and start investments in newly invented operations like corporations. These people had the military power and technologies to continue their plunder throughout the world, moving on when they had destroyed land, stealing valuables like labor (slavery), gold. silver and other resources, often with the co-operation of other powers (such as local rulers).

This process of dispossession and investment, created a working class in the UK and elsewhere, who could no longer support themselves through their own food production and farms, craft or traditional labor. The self-reliance of the people was destroyed by capitalism and turned into reliance on transactional capitalist bosses. Eventually traditional aristocrats had to move into business or marry into business, because their lands no longer brought in enough income to live at the level required by their culture and forms of social power.

The State acted to support the rising capitalists and enforce this dispossession and impoverishment. This allowed the workers to be exploited in factories often with working and living conditions so bad, that capitalists were also stealing the health and lives of the workers as they were with slavery.

Eventually this similar experience lead to the working class unifying and struggling against bosses who extracted riches from them, and forming unions, fighting for political rights, political participation and decent working and living conditions

Marx expected these processes to lead to revolution and the abolition of capitalism and its State. There is no capitalism without a capitalist State. Marx rather naively seems to have thought that Communism without the State, would have few contradictions.

However, the processes in the West first led to the post war semi-socialist welfare State, as a defense against the possibilities of revolution, but capitalists fought back, and restored their dominance, as their control of wealth production enabled them to support ‘free market’ ideas through sponsored think tanks, fund politicians, persuade the State to make union life much harder and to repeal the taxes which allowed the welfare state to exist.

This set of pro-corporate political and economic actions is often known as ‘Neoliberalism.’ Some say this counter-revolution happened because capitalists were still afraid of workers’ revolution or the political influence coming from the new freedoms of people to participate politically, or because capitalism had become less profitable. I don’t know what is the case.

Liberty for ordinary people, collapsed and we are now living in a capitalist in plutocracy which is slowly destroying itself by impoverishing the people, destroying the competitive market, and destroying functional ecology. The only ‘solution’ being proposed for current capitalist contradictions seems to be authoritarianism, suppression of dissent and keeping people exhausted at work. Similar solutions were previously tried in the 1930s and did not work that well. There is no reason to assume they will work now.

However, information has been shown to be important. In my experience, many people still believe that the Mueller Report cleared Trump, did not find anything wrong with his behaviour or was a fraud. That Trump is being conspired against by the establishment and the FBI. That Putin is scared of Trump and campaigns for Democrats. That Harris slept her way to the top and is a communist who organised the assassination attempts on Trump, and that a vote for Trump is a far safer and more sensible than a vote for her. This may well give the US election to Trump and have massive effects on world history and the rush to collapse. The relationship of ideas and social forces, may ultimately depend on material forces, but ideas can give victory, although a pure materialist could point out these pro-Trump ideas are driven by corporations. However other corporations oppose them.

Conclusion

Historical materialism claims the main driving factors of history are material ones: material conditions, material and social organization, the possibilities of technology, and the allocation of violence. Ideas are largely secondary to these processes. History is not the expression of Spirit, great men, or God’s will.

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Energy and Economy

September 23, 2024

The Leader of the Australian Coalition and opposition party made a recent speech I will be returning to. In this post I simply want to discuss a basic error that he opens with, which I think is dangerous.

He starts

Energy isn’t part of the economy.

Energy is the economy.

He attributes the remark to conservative journalist Chris Ullman and the statement could originate with Vaclav Smil, so this is a borrowed and considered statement, not a brain fart.

However, it is pretty obviously not true. Drop a nuclear bomb on Sydney, will any of that energy make an economy, improve Sydney’s economy or make Sydney’s people (as a whole) prosperous? No. It is more likely to immediately destroy processes than to immediately improve them.

Energy is not the economy, energy is vital to and limiting of economies.

It would seem vital to understand that economies and energy come along with:

  • Social organisation, labour, relations of power and relations of access to energy. These influence the way social wealth is distributed and inhibited. Control over resources such as energy and riches, gives people and organisations power to influence and pattern markets and other parts of society.
  • Available and directable energy. Unavailable and chaotic energy is rarely beneficial unless ordered and processed. As we have learnt recently, energy can be made unavailable to increase profits and lock in production.
  • Time constraints. Food has to be eaten before decay. Building something might take too long for it to be useful, when compared to the speed of the threat arising. How quickly can two different processes adjust to change?
  • Entropy, waste, pollution, increasing disorganisation, or illth. Economies always produce waste and usually produce ‘harms’. Economies can cause levels of destruction which overwhelm their ability to function. The more energy they have, the more destruction and alteration they are capable of.
  • Transport of goods (requires energy), so they can be traded.
  • Ecologies, land, food (which is energy), water, resources, and climate. It is best when the ecologies are working in a relatively harmonious systemic way, with humans and each other. A decaying ecology leads to a decaying economy. Ecologies are probably never completely balanced, but hugely unstable ecologies (often as disrupted by humans) are hard, and costly, to live within.
  • The ways we socially think about and imagine energy, and the way it is used to benefit human life. We may tend to think some apparently unreal energies are real, and that some energy sources are more powerful than they are.

in summary, The Economy is not just energy, but involves a system of systems, which depends on other systems. We have to keep all those systems working reasonably well for survival

These multiple interactions are vital points for understanding an economy, but people generally seem to want to ignore them. The question is why is Mr. Dutton enthusiastic about ignoring them?

I think he tends to answer this in his next passage, which in summary states.

If energy is cheap then all is well. If it is expensive then:

Our manufacturers pay more to produce and package goods.

Our builders pay more to construct homes.

High power prices have inflationary impacts across the economy.

Higher costs are passed on to Australians.

You end up paying more for every product, good and service.

Cheap and consistent energy is critical for more affordable lives and a more prosperous economy.

This is only true if we reduce the complexity of the economy, and refuse to ask what are the consequences of this cheap energy production? What are the power relations in the economy – who gets cheap energy? How destructive is the energy production – what does its pollution do? How available and directable is most of the energy? lots can be wasted. What effects does it have on the rest of the energy system? Does it interfere with other needed energy? What effects, long and short term, does it have on ecologies? How do we think about that energy?

These points make the economy more complex but also more real.

Peter Dutton then asserts that nuclear power is cheap, available and low illth.

He does this by:

  • Ignoring any costings whatsoever, or any need to pay back huge public expenditure through increasing the cost of electricity or something else.
  • Ignoring the time taken for construction and development, and what the state of the electricity system will be by the time nuclear is constructed.
  • Ignoring the issues and costs of waste, breakdown, servicing, decommissioning etc
  • Ignoring the magical socio-psychological appeals of nuclear. Can 7 to 14 nukes really save Australia from energy problems? Will they both replace coal that is going out of business and provided the extra energy we will need by 2050? (No, they are not even enough to replace the lost coal, it is only because nuclear seems magically powerful that this question can be avoided).
  • Dutton is still talking about SMRs which do not exist commercially and which are less powerful than standard nukes. This would imply these imaginings have a magical hold on him.
  • Ignoring any other effects nuclear may have on the economy, ecology, or energy supply, and
  • Discouraging low-cost low-GHG sources of energy, This discouragement will increase the use of gas and hence the production of GHG emissions.

Even assuming that his “hidden data” does make energy cheap. then a change in energy systems which does not reduce GHGs is not worth the money. So we need to know whether nuclear increases pollution and destruction and so on.

We expect a right wing politician to say the economy is society or that it is the important part of society because it makes business the essential part of society, but saying that we don’t need to think about the effects of different types of energies, involves ignoring everything important to human life and not being prepared for the potentially harmful interaction between systems.

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