Coal Mines and jobs

April 29, 2019

In Australia we have a large dispute over coal mines. In particular, people dispute over the proposed Carmichael coal mine in Queensland, run by the Indian company Adani which would be one of the largest coal mines in the world. Some say that if it opens then we may as well give up trying to stop climate disruption.

Politicians frequently defend the mine by saying it will result in at least 10,000 jobs in a fairly depressed area. This is also the figure that Adani chuck around when they are not in court.

In court where they can charged with perjury, the story is different.
Adani’s expert witness in the Land Court, Jerome Fahrer from ACIL Allen consulting, claimed (and please read this carefully)

“Over the life of the Project it is projected that on average around 1,464 employee years of full time equivalent direct and indirect jobs will be created.”

  • 1) This is over the *life time* of the project.
  • 2) “1464 employee years” (so if everyone works two years that is 732 jobs for two years, if every job lasts for 4 years that is 366 jobs. If the life time of the mine is a mere 20 years, and all jobs last 20 years, then that is 70 or less jobs. The mine is forecast to be operating much longer than that (I have seen predictions of 50 to 60 years). It is likely the opening years of the mine will consume most of these “employee years” while it requires construction.
  • 3) “Direct and indirect” – this figure includes all the jobs that will be created in response to employment at the mine – bar tenders, contractors, motel staff and so on.
  • 4) Be created – this means on top of the jobs lost elsewhere, as other mines are forced to shut down, because of competition.
  • So we would be in high risk of destroying the Great Artesian Basin, Queensland’s agriculture and world climate stability, for less than 70 extra jobs over 20 years. Adani are notorious for not paying tax and royalties, so we might as well stop pretending that Australia will get anything for all this destruction.

    That was for the big mine. Adani will no longer open the big mine as it is too costly at the moment, so the jobs figure will be smaller. So we should not keep telling everyone this will come anywhere near solving Northern Queensland’s unemployment problem. This seems false rhetoric designed to persuade people that the mine should go ahead, and profits should be made and taken elsewhere.

    Mining jobs make up less of the workforce than retail jobs, accommodation and food, and far less than the arts. But of course people in the arts don’t count.

    Mining jobs have traditionally been well paid so miners are naturally attached to them, but this small number of jobs in Queensland is probably not going to maintain a field of high paying jobs, and it is a trivial number of well paid jobs given the risks….

    Mining jobs are also becoming increasingly automated, so it may be that even fewer extra jobs will be created – although this will probably be blamed on Green politicians, rather than on mining company automation.

    All of this suggests that coal mines do not benefit the country in any significant way, but they do endanger it for profit.

    The Difference between libertarianism and fascism

    April 24, 2019

    The way it seems to work is like this:

    A whole lot of business suited guys are holding a person to down and stealing their money. They are also pouring poison on them, maybe gassing them, and taking their land and freedom away. Often they appear to miss and destroy the ground everyone is standing or lying on, but that is part of the fun. Eventually, the suits get a bit bored and they hire a few politicians and think-tank people to do the work for them – as long as they get most of the money and the pleasure of doing the poisoning themselves.

    Maybe the person being robbed and poisoned stands up and says “I’m going to sue you guys”, but the person finds out that the suits buy all the best lawyers and they got the politicians to write the laws they wanted, because they can. In pure Capitalistland you get the justice you can afford.

    Finally, the person is coughing blood and a group of libertarians comes up and kicks them down again, yelling in perfect unison that: “The rich are better than you. Everyone can do what they want. The only reason you aren’t doing the kicking, thieving and poisoning is because you don’t work hard enough and the market is not free enough. Be grateful. If you give the market what it wants then you will benefit. Give business even more power and you will be free! If you don’t benefit, its all your own fault. Everything you suffer now is the fault of the State!”

    The person being beaten up must be stopped from allying with anyone in the same position so as to defend themselves or assert their liberty from suits. And they must be stopped from objecting to the violence in the system and the destruction of the world around them.

    Libertarians seem to exist to support the authority and hierarchy of wealth (and hereditary wealth at that), while pretending this hierarchy and power is entirely voluntary. They appear to be prepared to temporarily ally with anyone who wholeheartly supports this hierarchy, and attack anyone who does not. This is why they appear more comfortable supporting Republican authoritarianism or Christian totalitarianism than they are in supporting social democracy, even when the social democracy movement is attacking the power of the state to dictate people’s lives.

    Indeed, democracy seems a bad word for them, as it might impact negatively on the ‘natural’ plutocracy. The people might decide they are as worthy as the rich, and don’t want to be ruled by the rich, and this form of evil ‘majoritarianism’ has to be stopped. They also seem to oppose any action which would weaken gender and race hierarchies, by pretending that this would disappear when capitalists had full control. Any other action is, in their minds, an attempt to compel the already dominant to accept equality, which cannot be allowed.

    However, Libertarians can be distinguished from fascists as they probably would not support attempts to make these hierarchies more rigid in themselves, to the extent they are not based on wealth. Libertarians also would probably not support the fascist State when it tried to curtail the power of the rich and the market. Indeed it often appears they cannot tell the difference between social democracy and fascism for that reason.

    The difference between real anarchists and libertarians is that anarchists realise all capitalism is crony capitalism, all capitalism both requires and sets up a state to protect capitalist power and property, and all capitalism leads to plutocracy and destruction.

    Clive Palmer and the Australian Election

    April 23, 2019

    In Australia, we are in the middle of a Federal Election at the moment. It should be the case that the current Coalition government gets voted out, but they have the support of the Murdoch Empire and most of the media, despite their amazing incompetence, forceful suggestions of corruption and total disinterest in facing the problems of climate change.

    We also have a variety of odd politicians competing. One of whom, is Clive Palmer a mining magnate, who has spent a lot of time in court…. It has been alleged that Mr. Palmer has budgeted $80 million for his parliamentary campaign, based on being Australia’s Donald Trump. This budget is plausible given that it is more or less impossible to avoid his adverts on the road, in the paper and on youtube, and has been for months.

    The big questions we should be asking are: “Why is Clive Palmer spending all this money to get elected?” and “What’s in it for him?”

    A plausible answer is that he is probably trying to get the huge Alpha North coalmine going in the Galilee basin near the proposed Adani Carmichael mine. Alpha North is as big as the Carmichael mine, and the Carmichael mine will probably destroy the Great Artesian Basin which inland Australia depends upon for its water. Two such mines make this almost a certainty. Adani has already been promised unlimited water access.

    If Adani can get up, then his mine should be approved (after all he has the advantage of being ‘Australian!’), and he gets the rail line he needs which will have been built for the Adani mine to work.

    If Adani is rejected, then he can still agitate for the money and infrastructure to get his mine going.

    He apparently wants the coal mine to support a massive coal fired power station which he also wants to build in Queensland. This is despite Queensland already having more energy than it knows what to do with, but it would lock Australia into coal.

    He can also probably challenge any attempts to get decent royalties out of mining companies, or to tax mining companies at a reasonable (non-zero) rate.

    This is especially the case if his party holds balance of power in the Senate which is quite likely.

    If any of this is true, the massive investment in his party has been worthwhile for him.

    A good idea is not enough….

    April 9, 2019

    Thinking about the way that things could go wrong is useful when we start thinking ecologically in terms of systems and complexity; unsuspected connections and feedbacks, interaction of supposedly separate systems, and so on.

    Linear thinking, with understood and simple causal connections, is helpful but its not always enough. In recognizing complexity, we can recognize that ‘things’ frequently get out of control.

    So let us suppose we have a solution to a problem. This is a list to point us to what may happen, if we don’t think about it. The list is almost certainly incomplete.

    “that something is a good idea is not enough…”

  • It can be feasible, but we don’t put enough energy into it to do it in time needed or avaiable.
  • It can be feasible but it’s much harder than we think.
  • It may be feasible and succeeds, but it does not do enough.
  • It may be feasible and succeeds, but disrupts other systems we think are not connected to it
  • It can be feasible but powerful people and institutions attempt to undermine its possibility, so we have a political problem as well as an ‘engineering’ problem.
  • It can be feasible but normally non-powerful people unite against it as it disturbs them, or they have not been consulted, or they face problems you are ignoring.
  • It may be feasible, but fighting for it distracts our attention from significant problems, either to do with it, or to do with the rest of the world. (As when fighting against climate change distracts us from other ecological challenges.)
  • It could be feasible if we knew about, or involved, other factors that we currently either don’t know or think are irrelevant.
  • It could be feasible but the way we are organising it’s implementation is not helpful or destructive to its aims.
  • It can be infeasible to begin with.
  • It may not be compatible with our expectations of what it will do.
  • It can have unintended effects which make the situation worse, but we don’t know about them until its deployed.
  • It can be successful at first and then fail.
  • It can succeed.
  • The world will end in 12 years???

    April 9, 2019

    Another meme that seems to circulate around the net is that climate scientists are saying the world will end in 12 years. This would appear to be ridiculous, and therefore is intended to discredit the whole idea of climate change.

    I personally don’t know of, nor have I read of, any scientists who warn that the world will end in 12 years due to climate change. As usual, I’m welcome to correction, but I doubt this will happen.

    However, what plenty of people have warned is that we have about 12 years left in which to seriously diminish the causes of climate change. If we don’t, the weather conditions are likely to move into greater degrees of instability and tumultuousness, and sea level rises will be significant.

    With only a warming of one degree, it appears that areas of the USA seem to be on the edge of failing to cope with the stresses of fires, floods and storms, and areas like Puerto Rico seem to have largely been abandoned by the current US government. The same is becoming true in Australia; areas are getting too hot for habitation, and water supplies seem to be diminishing (sometimes because of mining as well as climate change).

    As chaotic weather gets worse, it will cost billions in destroyed property, and distract from other economic activity. It will probably also mean massive people movements, food shortages and so on.

    I quote here from the LA times

    By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. (emphasis added)

    Cynically, this is probably a reason why EPA research is being cut back; it gives results some people might not want to hear, and might not want other people to hear.

    However, while climate change could well begin the end of the civilizations we know and live in, and lead to lots of people dying, it won’t end the world. The world will carry on and some humans, those who have learnt to co-operate and have farming or hunting and gathering skills, will probably survive. With some luck, relatively large scale societies in more fortunate parts of the world may well survive. The scale and prosperity of social life we have now in the developed world and are aiming at elsewhere, will probably end.

    Strangely, attempting to prevent this collapse seems relatively easy. People can disagree about what action is needed to diminish climate change, but it usually comes down to phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, lowering other forms of pollution and poisoning coming from productive processes, and not taking more fish and trees than can be grown back.

    If we would like long term survival, this would seem sensible anyhow.

    Questions about ‘nature’ and geological time

    April 6, 2019

    A friend responded to the last post on nature. I understood them to be essentially making three points:

    Point one: The division between human and nature is similar to the division between body and soul, essentially ficticious.

    Point two: As Humans are natural phenomena, everything they have done is natural. So nature is damaging itself.

    Point three: Any act has unforeseen consequences and the world exists in geological time, consequently we have no hope of a political solution to climate change or ecological degradation.

    This is my attempt to deal with these issues.

    Point 1: The idea of ‘nature’ is a human construct. Like Bateson and others I prefer to think of ecologies and systems. These ideas do challenge ideas of separation, but I’d also like to suggest that the conceptual differences between ‘mind and body’ and ‘human and nature’ are different. The degrees of separation and independence are not the same.

    Firstly, there is a non-human world which has, in many senses, little to do with me. I am not it, and it is not me. It has gone on for billions of years without me. It will go on, hopefully for more billions of years, without me. Currently, humans cannot survive without the non-human, and they have emerged out of it – yet once emerged, humans are no longer just a non-reflective part of the rest of the ecology. They are never the whole of the system, and could even be thought of as having a potential to differ from the rest of the system.

    However, my body and me do not exist separately in this sense. I can only learn and act with this body. If one dies the other dies. My body is not non-human. It is what makes me human. There is no sense of independence of one side from the other, unless you believe in immortal souls – and that is probably the basis of the idea of separation. There is nothing obvious in the idea of the two being potentially separate or independent.

    This takes us to point 2.

    Point 2: This potential to be different may not be unique to humans, but there are human constructions which would not exist without humans. Just as there are destructions of ecological systems which would not happen without humans.

    It seems to me, there is a problem with dismissing the term ‘nature’ and then keeping the word ‘natural’ to apply to everything which happens on earth and take a position in which human acts and decision become irrelevant, or perfectly in keeping with the rest of the eco-systems. Without this somewhat indiscriminate application of the idea of ‘natural’, there is a sense that humans are ‘extra’ to nature, despite emerging from nature.

    Paving a forest is not ‘natural’, as in the world without humans, or human equivalents, this could not occur. Again it emerges out of an ecology, but is destructive of the ecology in a way that the ecology could not achieve without humans. Humans are special, but they are not so special they are above nature. This seems hard for people in the west to grasp. People seem to want humans to be either above nature, or just another bacteria of no real consequence.

    To restate: while humans emerge from an ecology of ecologies, the consequences of their acts and decisions can be destructive to the rest of the ecology, and they can be aware of this. In that sense they can be contra-‘natural’ or contra-ecological. This is not a purely human phenomena, other organisms have changed the world’s ecology, but those organisms do not appear to have decided to do this, and have done it slowly enough for other life forms to evolve to deal with, and take advantage of, the transformation. The change has been ecological. Again this is not saying humans will destroy the world, eventually new life will arise, but possibly human life will not survive the rapid changes we are inducing in our ecology, and I personally would find that sad.

    Point 3: While it is true that many other creatures seem intelligent or self-aware, it also seems that humans are both intelligent and self-aware to an extent which is unusual. This does not mean that humans are intelligent or self-aware without limits, but it does mean that we have a greater degree of responsibility for our actions. If a bacteria developed which ate everything in its path, then we would probably try and defeat it, but we would not hold it morally culpable. If humans destroy everything in their path then, most humans in their path would say the destroyers should, and perhaps could, have made a different decision. Indeed it appears to be the case that humans, and many creatures, can make decisions.

    Finding the right time scale on which to live and make decisions, is likely to be vitally important for life in general. Some decisions or reactions have to be made immediately if you are to survive. Some decisions reflective creatures have more time to make, and for some decisions the creatures may need to think about the time frame for the effects of that decision, whether it is hours, days, months, years, centuries and so on. Thinking either in too long time frames or too short time frames can be deleterious to effectiveness.

    Looking at making political or ethical decisions within a time frame of geological time is a good way to achieve demotivation. This is probably why many of the people who embrace climate do-nothingness, or those few non worried scientists, appear to prefer thinking in geological time frames. In terms of geological time, human lives do not matter, creatural lives do not matter, even species survival does not matter. The rocks go on. Life goes on, and it is way outside our sphere of activity.

    Nothing matters so we don’t have to make decisions, we don’t have to struggle, we don’t have to worry, we do not have to take any responsibility for any of our own actions in geological times. We can, inadvertently, just let powerful people get on with destroying life chances for everyone, for their temporary benefit – because you can be sure the rulers of the world are not thinking in geological terms. Indeed it seems a common complaint that business does not think beyond the next quarter, which is probably too short a time frame for long term social survival, and increases the risks of any climate change….

    One thing that seems to happen regularly when people discover complexity theory, is the assertion that because you cannot control everything in fine detail, you cannot influence anything, or make any decision that is wiser or better than any other. As a consequence, some people argue that complexity theory is wrong, while others argue that politics is wrong. In both cases people seem to be saying that because we cannot do everything perfectly, we can do nothing. This seems silly, and we make decisions and act in our lives all the time despite the fact that these decisions don’t always have the expected consequences. Indeed, most of us might be bored if they did.

    It then seems strange to argue that human oppression of other humans is nothing new, and that some humans suffer disastrously because of this. This again seems an abdication, a demand for perfection of complete non-oppression, or a refusal to deal with difficulty. We may not remove hierarchies completely, but that does not mean that some hierarchies are not better than others, and we should not strive for better hierarchies. It also seems odd to tie this in with geological time, as in geological time, these kinds of destructive human hierarchies are extremely new. They are probably at most 10,000 years old, which is nothing.

    As a side note, it seems to me, that the so-called hierarchies found in ecological systems are not the same as hierarchies in human systems, it is just a metaphor being taken for reality; ecological hierarchies don’t deliberately oppress in an attempt to generate their own benefit.

    Humans are capable of living without mass destruction of global ecological systems, if they learn to adapt to systems or discover how change those systems in beneficial ways, that continue in human time frames. We know this. Some complex civilisations have lasted for considerable periods of time. This means that it is possible to live with ecologies. Difficult, but possible. It is partly a matter of choosing the right frameworks.

    Making all human behavior ‘natural’ and thinking in geological time frames are probably not the right frameworks.

    Will “Nature” adapt to climate change?

    March 31, 2019

    “Nature” is facing massive ecological disruptions through pollution, poisoning, disruption of chemical cycles, deforestation, over-fishing, intensive agriculture, massive fires, and so on, as well as through climate change.

    Nature will adapt. It will change; nature always changes. Vast numbers of creatures are already going extinct or are extinct, or are moving to new places, so the evidence for massive change, happening now, is pretty high.

    However, humans probably cannot kill off the entire biosphere. Even with nuclear war, some of the planet and its life will remain. We can change Nature, perhaps impoverish nature (for a long while) but probably will not exterminate it.

    More narrowly a more useful focus is whether, with all these changes in ecology, human life will be able to continue and progress the way that it is already doing.

    The answer is probably not. Massive weather fluctuations, storms, floods, droughts, water shortages, food shortages, sea level rises, etc. will make huge challenges for human societies. We humans will probably not adapt quickly enough to maintain large scale civilisations. We probably won’t die out as a species, but that is a matter of hope – plenty of individuals will die early if we don’t adapt.

    Partly, this failure to adapt will occur, if it occurs, because powerful and wealthy people do not like change as it threatens both their power and wealth.

    Those elites benefit from, and have largely initiated, the politics and economics that are causing the problems, so it is hard for them to face the uncertainty of complete change. They can (and do) spend heaps of money convincing people that nothing is happening, that we play no role in what is happening, that there is nothing we can do, or that things will get better.

    They may well think that they can survive, and it is just us ordinary folk that will suffer. Some forms of capitalism encourage the idea that it’s every ‘man’ for themselves, so it is possible.

    Consequently, we cannot passively rely on economic or political elites to adapt societies for us. We have to participate in, and agitate for, the adaptation ourselves. And that involves admitting the possibility of change, and facing the fear, grief and other forms of distress together with others, as things pass away, and organizing with others to do something constructive. Even small changes in your personal life are a start towards this. Small changes mount up.

    We may not have enough time. But if we give up, and let the uninterested elites triumph, then we will not have enough time.

    Carbon Extraction

    March 31, 2019

    There are many plans to extract CO2 directly from the air. Many people assure us it is necessary if we are to keep climate turmoil moderately stable, and avoid tipping points. However, as there is not that much CO2 in the air, you have to move vast quantities of air through the extraction plant, which requires heaps of energy, so you already have a problem.

    The second problem is what do you do with the CO2?

    Storage underground is unreliable – especially under the ocean or in old oil and gas wells (as the wells tend to fracture and crack releasing the CO2) and leakage has to be monitored and prevented for 100s of years, well beyond the life span of most companies or even governments.

    Some solutions seem silly – after all in capitalism nothing is done, even something as obvious as save the world, unless it is compelled or makes a profit.

    It has been proposed to use the CO2 to make the bubbles in soft drinks. Or to pump oil out of nearly dry wells, getting a substance that then produces more CO2.

    Other people have suggested turning the CO2 into fuel and burning less oil or coal. The ‘and’ is important here, otherwise we are just adding to greenhouse gas emissions.

    The problem with this last solution is the laws of thermodynamics. This process will have to use energy both to recover the CO2 and then turn it into fuel – more energy than will be gained by burning the fuel.

    So the process can only be useful if we have lots of non-greenhouse gas making energy to spare, which we use to extract the CO2 from the air and manufacture the fuel. Our energy should likewise not be ecologically disruptive, and hydro for example certainly can be, as it floods some areas, dries up other areas, stops natural seasonal flows, stops aquatic creatures going upriver and so on.

    The process is not impossible, but currently unlikely, at any level which makes the process useful.

    Sea level rise and Climate change

    March 31, 2019

    We all know the threat that coastal cities will likely be inundated by rising seas. Indeed in some parts of Australia, Local Councils are apparently declaring that some low lying residential areas are to be abandoned. Residents are, I’m told, even being forbidden from raising their houses higher or otherwise attempting to protect them. This is, in my opinion, crazy. It seems to be a way of trying to pretend that we should not act, or that everything will be ok.

    Other people point out that certain cities, such as New Orleans, or even countries such as Holland, are already beneath sea level, and its all ok. Of course in New Orleans this was one reason why Katrina was so disastrous. However, when things, like being beneath sea level are normal, and have been normal for a long time, they can be generally be dealt with, no question. Levee and dyke walls already exist and perhaps it will be feasible to expand them to cope with the extra pressure of more water.

    Some problems here stem from the nature of the cities themselves. Some cities are built on relatively porous rock, or even on sand (think of the Queensland Gold Coast) and, in that case, waters may flow under levy walls, and rise up to sea level. New sea walls are also likely to have to extend either for large distances inland or along the coast and change the coastal ecology and erosion patterns – although those will also be changed by climate change. Relatively close to the surface water tables could also be contaminated. It is complicated.

    Other people can argue that the current rate of sea level rise is so slow that we have nothing to worry about at all. For example we can quote the Royal society, the “best estimates of the global-average rise over the last two decades centred on 3.2 mm per year (0.12 inches per year).” At this rate it would take over 600 years to get a rise of 2 metres. We could probably deal with this quite easily.

    However, there are lots of problems with accurate prediction of such things as sea level rise.

    The first is that the rate of rise is not going to be linear. The more land ice melts, the less radiation reflected into space and the more land ice will melt. The more greenhouse gases we keep emitting then the faster the melting will happen, and if we reach the tipping points at which methane starts rising from the deep ocean and the tundras, then it could start happening very rapidly.

    People keep talking as if climate change and its problems expressed a nice gentle and smooth process, but it is not going to be that way. It is turbulent and chaotic. The climate system is what is known as “complex”, and turbulent change, once it is thrown out of equilibrium, is its nature. It will be hard to deal with, once things really start shifting, and they could shift rapidly.

    That is why we need to act now while the situation is not too bad. That is why we keep being told that we have to reach greenhouse gas targets by 2030, and that it is better to come in even lower. If we don’t reach those targets then the probability of great turbulence is very high.

    Anyone who tells you there is nothing to worry about, is assuming that they can predict a nice transition or control that transition. This position is extremely unlikely.

    It is best to agitate for action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the possibility of chaos, now.

    The Mueller Report is presented

    March 29, 2019

    I find the media response to the summary of the Mueller report extraordinary.

    They largely seem to be falling over themselves to say President Trump is in the clear. That is, they are gladly supposing that an appointee of Trump, who has already implied the President cannot obstruct justice, is going to give an honest unbiased account of the Mueller report.

    I’m simply asking people what they would think if Hillary Clinton had:

    1) publicly asked the Russians to hack Republican emails and the Russians did,

    2) secret business dealings with Russians during the campaign and lied about it,

    3) invited those Russians to her inauguration party,

    4) members of her campaign committee with secret dealings with Russians who paid them,

    5) members of her campaign who knew in advance of leaking of Republican emails,

    6) her daughter, son-in-law and campaign chair attend a secret meeting with Russians to get dirt on the Republican candidate and lie about it,

    7) her designated national security advisor engages in secret talks with the Russian ambassador about removing sanctions and lies about it to the FBI,

    8) large numbers of her campaign team had been accused of, and in some cases convicted of, criminal offenses,

    9) repeatedly tried to stop the inquiry,

    10) as president reveals classified information to Russian government representatives including the foreign minister,

    11) has secret meetings with Putin as President, and

    12) there was evidence that Russians had supported her in the election along with other shady elites who had exploited loopholes in Facebook, and other forms of social media, to manipulate discussion and promote their interests.

    If so, would you think there was a problem?