Guest essay by Viv Forbes
To compete in today’s world we need to score well on resource availability, capital assets, energy costs, tax burden and workforce/management. It also helps to have secure property rights and a sound currency. Today’s Australia scores poorly on all counts.
In 1901, the year of Federation, Australia was the richest country in the world per capita.
The Pioneer generations, with freedom to explore and invest, had developed valuable mineral assets – gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper, coal, tin and iron. And they had bred up large numbers of sheep and cattle on our native grasslands.
Energy was abundant – wood, horse power, kerosene, gas, hydro and coal powered electricity – we were among world leaders in cheap energy. Sydney had gas lights in its streets as far back as 1820.
The Pioneering innovators also invented game-changers such as the stump jump plough, the Ridley-Sunshine Harvester and froth flotation of minerals, and they developed better Australian versions of Leviathan coaches, Southern Cross windmills, Merino sheep, Shorthorn cattle, Federation wheat, Kelpies and Blue Heeler dogs.
The Builder generations who followed the pioneers invested heavily in productive capital assets like flour mills and wool sheds, mines and collieries, smelters and saw mills, power stations and electric trams, trans-continental railways and overland telegraph lines, orchards and plantations, stockyards and abattoirs, breweries and vineyards, dams and artesian bores, factories and universities, exploration and research, pipelines and harbours, railways and roads. There were no “Lock-the-Gate” signs.
Governments were decentralised with minimal taxes and red tape, creating new business was easy and union power was minimal and generally beneficial for workers.
But then the Termite generations took over, and for much of the last forty years taxes, handouts and green tape have been smothering new enterprise. We are sponging on the ageing assets created by past generations and building little to support future Australians. The monuments left by this generation are typified by casinos, sports arenas, wind-energy prayer wheels, sit-down money and debt.
The trendy war on carbon has already inflated our electricity costs – this will hasten the closure of more processing and manufacturing industries. Green tape is shutting-the-gate on new investments in exploration, grassland protection, dams, power stations, fishing, forestry and coastal development. Taxes are weakening existing industry and the savings that could build new industries are being wasted on bureaucracy, delays, legalism, subsidies, climate tomfoolery and green energy toys. Finally, union featherbedding is crippling any large survivors.
Australia’s future prosperity demands cheap energy, more investment in productive assets, reduced government costs, more productive labour and the freedom to explore and innovate.
We must change, or more jobs will follow Holden.
More at carbon-sense.com
climateace said @ur momisugly December 27, 2013 at 2:42 pm
There are many issues not mentioned for what is a fairly obvious reason: there are ever so many of them. Not mentioned:
Greenpeace lying about Tasmanian apple growers using Alar. Alar was used on the mainland to colour Red Delicious in the absence of cold nights and sunny days that we enjoy in abundance.
As well as reducing costs by more rational chemical use, the industry adopted management practices that resulted in pack-out rates of between 90 and 95%, well ahead of the 60% when those practices were mooted.
A dramatic increase in the cost of agricultural lime when the greens lobbied successfully to shut down the Lune River lime quarry. Bob Brown suggested we should be importing lime from Japan. It was costly enough importing what is a very dense material from the North West of the state.
The average Tasmanian farmer now has to spend at least one whole day a week filling in forms to satisfy green-tape.
Dating back to the days of St Keating de Paul, the elimination of almost all farm subsidies (such as tax rebate on diesel fuel).
President of the Australian Dairy Farmers, Noel Campbell, believes the carbon tax is pushing up costs for dairy farms by an average of $5,500-$7,000 per year through increased power prices and processing costs. Tasmanian dairy farmers also have the additional cost of the carbon tax on freighting product to the mainland and importing inputs.
Australia’s disease is not caring about what they put in their mouths. China clearly has no compunction about selling produce here that is unfit for human consumption. The average person wants cheap food-like substances rather than real food and castigate farmers as “middle class welfare beneficiaries”.
Now I’m off to mow a meadow…
MB
Apart from the national lists there are lists for every state and territory in Australia. I link here the Victorian site. ‘Action statements’ refer to the activities thought to ensure that the species will not become extinct. It is reasonable to assume that in the absence of regulation and in the absence of activities related to improving populations and the perpetuation of current pressures many such species will go extinct.
My point was, and is, that we have started a mass extinction event. What we do about it here on in is a matter of choice.
http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/plants-and-animals/flora-and-fauna-guarantee-act-action-statements-index-of-approved-action-statements
The Pompous Git
I agree that there are a range of reasons not canvassed upstring that impact on farming profitability. Nevertheless, seasons aside, Australian farm commodity exports are booming.
How do you rationalise this discrepancy?
Reg Nelson
[climateace says:
December 27, 2013 at 12:36 pm
My point was that this is a bizarre position when Australia is moving up the rung of world economies. Further, if these things are so damaging, why has the Australian economy – virtually alone among OECD countries, grown for 21 consecutive quarters?
—-
The Aussie economy has grown because it has huge mineral resources — which are mostly in the middle of nowhere (no one else’s backyard).
It has nothing to do with the Rudd\Gillard governments, which inherited a Howard surplus and pissed it away in record time.]
The original discussion was that green regulation and a weak currency (!) and expensive energy was rendering Australia uncompetitive.
My response was that the Australian economy could hardly be uncompetitive if it was climbing up the rung by size of international economies.
Huge external profit driven investments in fossil fuel and iron ore exports, including massive associated infrastructure, have generated this massive growth in the economy. If the foreign investors were put off by poor governance, over-regulation and a carbon tax, they would simply not have made the investments. As for Forbes’ ‘weak currency’ – from a manufacturing and farm export POV – if only!
I agree with the comment above that there is too much red tape.
I would get rid of all that Costello-induced nonsense having to do with the introduction of the GST for a start…
Climateace,
Rather than shooting from the hip, I’m taking a few hours tonight to do due diligence on your materials. Briefly though,
No, but populations on islands behave differently than mainland species, they are much more prone to extinction in the first place, for example. It’s not safe to blindly generalize without differentiating island vrs mainland species.
I will dispute this.
An aside: I realize (now) that our discussion isn’t constrained to extinctions due to climate change as I originally assumed for no particularly good reason. I’m overtrained I guess. I haven’t yet thought through how this might affect my position. Off the top of my head, I don’t think it does.
I’ll get back to you. Thanks for your patience and for the links.
Whatever the merits of some of the points that climateace (the same as the earlier Climate Ace?) raises in amongst his streams of blustering rudeness, the extinction meme seems to be a furphy. As far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the original article. For example: almost all of the ‘Australian’ bird extinctions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals_of_Australia) were on islands (many, e.g. Norfolk, Lord Howe, Macquarie only politically Australian) and those with probable causes all have to do with very early hunting, fires and introduction of exotics (esp. black rats). The frog extinctions are most likely due to the introduction of the chytrid fungus. The mammal extinctions are also most likely primarily due to introduced exotics and only secondarily to direct human persecution or habitat destruction. Even the unfortunate Thylacine was done-in by disease after bounties had been lifted – the thriving colony in the Melbourne Zoo also was wiped out. Pathogen pollution has been and continues to be (Myrtle Rust is a current example) a major threat to Australia’s fauna and flora, but has nothing to do with the Forbes article.
I don’t know enough to say much about the vascular plants that are alleged to be extinct (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_flora_of_Australia), but it isn’t much of a list and some are not very impressive. For example, Euphrasia ruptura – a grass-parasitic subshrub described in 1997 from 2 branches collected in 1904. Species in this genus are known to be profligate interspecific hybridizers and a ‘species’ based on two old branches seems very weak and probably only proposed because it appeared to be ‘extinct’. Acacia kingiana was probably destroyed by agriculture, but the wild banana Musa fitzalanii from the Daintree? I doubt it (known only from the type specimen and it is only presumed extinct).
climateace’s sweeping statement “You can safely assume suites of invertebrate and non-vascular plant extinctions to go with each higher order extinction” is, in my opinion, garbage. There is no supporting data that I know of. Bryophytes have very good dispersal abilities and tend to have broad distributions. Many thrive on disturbance. I’m sure any host-specific invertebrate parasites or commensals of the extinct vertebrates went extinct too, and no doubt most of the large insects or those with long generation times or requiring specific hosts or microclimates on islands have taken a hit, but again introduced exotics are more likely primary causes of such extinctions than direct human disturbance.
Red tape, bureaucracies, carbon taxes, ‘green’ energy (think windmills, vast solar arrays, strip mining for rare earths for batteries), and the like are not friends of wildlife or wild plants: any that get in the way will be chopped or plowed for the political opportunists that promote them and the profits they reap from government subsidy.
climateace says: December 27, 2013 at 2:42 pm
TPG… I think we are more or less on the same page as regards forestry.
The handling of forestry by governments listening to green BS has been a disgrace. In Queensland they shut down forests which had been sustainably logged for 100 years and were managed by departments which had been internationally recognized for their excellence in forest management.
Now it all just overgrows and burns, and then they sqwuark loudly about global warming.
Idealism is one thing, but idiocy is closely related.
DaveW
If you really want ‘blustering rudeness’ you should see some of the things that people upstring have been saying about me.
I argued that the original article was bizarre in two ways:
(1) it argued that Australia was an uncompetitive economy inter alia because of green regulations and expensive energy.
(2) it implied that there was no benefit to green regulations.
I put it that the first position was invalidated by the Australian economy growing for something like 21 quarters in a row and that the Australian economy by size was moving up the international table.
In relation to (2) my position is that we have entered a mass extinction event and that we have a choice. We can have a mix of regulations and positive actions to stop the mass extinction event or we can allow it to continue.
There seems to be some reluctance to face our mass extinction event or to address the statistics. Many of the species listed as vulnerable, threatened or endangered are not island species, for example. Yet denialists always head for the islands.
In relation to reasons for extinctions, you are quite right to point out that they arise from different processes and different variables. As far as I am aware, none of the relevant processes have been either halted or reversed. Pathogens, pests, predators, weeds continue to be introduced by settlers, farmers, miners and horticulturalists, for example. Clearing continues.
In relation to invertebrates, BTW, your example is actually irrelevant. Individual vertebrates and vascular plants typically ‘carry’ a species-specific set of invertebrates. These might, for example, include highly specialized creatures like moths which depend on termite-mound nesting birds. Some of these have been documented.
MB
http://www.environment.gov.au/node/22818
Anthony,
You have here another fascinating thread full of insights and new information. I hope you don’t close this one down just yet. (I know it’s your blog and your prerogative to say what goes on, but I think you closed down the Apollo 8 thread too soon and for the wrong reason).
Here’s why in my opinion:- In response to the argument about lunar rotation Reed Coray posted this comment Dec 25 @ur momisugly 10:09 pm describing a superb mechanical model that, for me, indisputable proves the case for lunar rotation.
The next gem was posted by Greg @ur momisugly 10:46 pm.
In response to the challenges of Gerald Kelleher , Greg moves his own understanding of climate data to a new level of comprehension when he incorporates the following insight into his analysis:-
Then we come to the postings of Gerald Kelleher himself. As far as I can tell he is not a proponent of barycentrism, rather he opposes it and is pre-Newtonian in his ideas. His 24 hour earth day of 360 degrees of rotation appears to be Aristotelian in concept, (he certainly cannot have the earth in orbit around the sun with 24 hour terrestrial days) For me his writings seem almost as if we are in an episode of Dr Who having a conversation with a Sumerian astronomer.
I hope that these examples go some way to demonstrating what a truly astonishing blog you have created here. They show science being conducted and broadcast in a way that demonstrates what a mockery of the true process of scientific inquiry other agenda driven climate blogs actually are.
MB
In the last link check out specifically the biodiversity section.
On extinction:
Presumably the background rate occurred before there were humans to count them. How they do that?
Yet:
Emphasis mine.
Note that this only the Amazon and it’s a mind-bogglingly big planet.
Sources:
http://www.endangeredspeciesinternational.org/overview.html
http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/38639/title/New-Species-Abound/
Okay, look. This is interesting material and I’m not done yet, but I’ve got a more general problem with this whole discussion. What definition of extinction event are we using? How do we differentiate between humans causing a few species to go extinct vrs say, an event that causes 75% or more species to go extinct?
Are we just using the phrase ‘extinction event’ because it’s catchy, or is it technically correct? Can we agree on a definition for mass extinction?
I find this from ‘The American Heritage Science Dictionary’:
That most dreadful source doesn’t seem to indicate extinction events can be local to continents:
Anyway. Humans have caused some species to go extinct, obviously. I’m not trying to split hairs here, at least part of my initial outrage with your remarks stemmed from the term ‘extinction event’ and your projection of trends over 10,000 years. If by ‘extinction event’ you merely mean that some small number of species are going to die out, then I think we’re using the wrong term.
I promised to dispute this:
To cut to the chase, governments are ephemeral on geological timescales. Most governments have lifespans in the hundreds of years. Perhaps some few have persisted past a thousand years, the point remains that laws are not the answer to problems on such timescales because governments don’t last long enough to make a difference. If endangered species will go extinct without specific legislative protection, then they are doomed; the best one can reasonably hope to do is fight a delaying action for a few hundred years.
Pompous Git
Plus, the soil micro-fauna has hardly been scratched.
MB
There are a couple of issues here.
(1) The beginning of the Australian mass extinction event is observable in a human time scale – we don’t even need a geological time scale. (I can name numerous species that I saw where I grew up which have disappeared from the local area since. I have seen species that were not extinct when I was a child but which are extinct now.)
(2) I am not sure about what percentage of total species is required to go extinct before we have a ‘mass extinction event’. I would be happy to go with 10%. That would involve the disappearance of 7,000 vertebrates and several tens of thousands of invertebrate from Australia. Vascular and non-vascular plants would presumably be commensurate.
(3) Most of the species which have gone extinct in the past 200 years in Australia have done so as a direct or indirect consequence of the actions of Forbes’ settlers and termites. (Interesting that Forbes uses the term ‘termites’ as a term of disapprobrium. Termites, with their capacity to digest cellulose, are indispensible to the productivity of many Australian landscapes.)
(4) The relevant human-based extinction pressures all still exist. Some old ones are continuing (clearing, changes to fire regime, changes to nutrient regime, changes to hydrology, introduced fauna – predators and competitors, flora, pathogens and pests.) New pressures are being added all the time. The ranges of most (but not all) surviving Australian vertebrates are a fraction of what they were 200 years ago.
(5) In the absence of regulations and positive actions taken to offset these pressures, including the protection of natural areas by way of national parks, there can be no doubt at all that the extinctions would continue and would probably increase, and that the mass extinction event we have started will continue.
My basic point is that we face a choice about whether to halt our mass extinction event or to speed it up.
[To cut to the chase, governments are ephemeral on geological timescales. Most governments have lifespans in the hundreds of years. Perhaps some few have persisted past a thousand years, the point remains that laws are not the answer to problems on such timescales because governments don’t last long enough to make a difference. If endangered species will go extinct without specific legislative protection, then they are doomed; the best one can reasonably hope to do is fight a delaying action for a few hundred years.]
I agree that we are fighting a delaying action and that the light at the end of the tunnel is pretty dim.
But I disagree that we should despair. IMHO, we can and should try to save Australia’s species.
climateace says: December 26, 2013 at 10:57 pm “As we would say in the bush, bullsh*t.”
CAce, you seem to have elementary problems of comprehension. My valid point was that the coal, iron, gas reserved now being exploited are precisely those discovered by my generation, we who were kids post-war. There has been bugger all successful exploration in the past 30 years, certainly for basic commodities like copper and nickel and tungsten, even non-essentials like gold.
As Viv and I both note, we are living off the success of a past generation. That’s dangerous for non-renewable resources, ones that need new discoveries to keep a good reserve of buffer.
Now admit you got it wrong.
climateace
“If you really want ‘blustering rudeness’ you should see some of the things that people upstring have been saying about me.”
True, I read through this string, but they are legion and seem to know you better than I. When you start off calling the Forbes article ‘bizarre’ and support your accusation with points that seem more disagreements based in political view than facts – and follow-up with repeated and mostly off-target attacks on the new Government and non sequiturs about mass extinctions – then it is actually your comments that seem ‘bizarre’. Your responses certainly undercut whatever points you may have been trying to make.
“Yet denialists always head for the islands.”
Anyone with an interest in extinction always goes to islands – they are machines of extinction (and also of speciation). Again, you demonstrate a lack of interest in understanding causes and fall back on bashing your perceived political opponents. You gave the links to wiki supporting your claim of an ongoing mass extinction and those links do not support the bloody shirt you wave.
“In relation to invertebrates, BTW, your example is actually irrelevant. Individual vertebrates and vascular plants typically ‘carry’ a species-specific set of invertebrates. These might, for example, include highly specialized creatures like moths which depend on termite-mound nesting birds. Some of these have been documented.”
Is this neo-Clemensian ecological theory or Gaia nonsense? Whatever, it sounds archaic to me and your position that ‘higher’ plants and animals are the building blocks of ecosystems sounds, well, bizarre. Vertebrates come and go, and some invertebrates go with them, but few other than parasites and commensals are ‘carried’ by vertebrates. Your termite mound nest-moth (and, BTW, neither bird nor moth would be around without the termites) fits exactly into my general example and yet you try to use it against me. Either you aren’t listening or you are simply arrogantly opinionated and not interested in the facts. If this is true for the biology, then I have to assume it is also true for your economic/political arguments.
daveW
(1) If you can explain why an economy that is uncompetitive in divers ways can (a) grow absolutely and (b) catch up on the next larger economies, please do so.
(2) I was using the vertebrates because someone raised them – as a proxy for the rest.
(3) You obviously have no idea about coprophagous invertebrates which are obligate to specific hollow-nesting species of birds.
Climateace,
(1) I agree with you. I didn’t mean to imply I don’t believe species can become extinct ‘in the blink of an eye’, I think I can find examples where that was exactly the case.
(2) OK, so we are discussing the proposition that unregulated human activity will cause 10% of species in Australia to become extinct. I still don’t know that extinction event is the right term, but so long as I know what we mean in the context of this conversation it doesn’t really matter.
(3) Probably.
(4) OK.
(5) But regulations don’t solve the problem. I’m not talking pathos here, I’m talking about solutions from the perspective of an engineer. The solution you propose doesn’t solve the problem. It’s not a solution. I’m not suggesting we despair or give up. I’m suggesting that we quit wasting our time trying to carry water uphill in a sieve and focus on finding a practical solution to the problem.
Government is important, and it’s good for some things. It’s not the solution to everything. I don’t know the solution to this problem, but I don’t see how government is the answer here.
Tell you what, I’ll go this far. Until I’ve got a better solution, I’ll accept that government conservation is the best we can do. Stalling is slightly better than nothing, in that as we’ve agreed, it doesn’t really take any time to speak of for species to go extinct. But what we really ought to be doing is studying realistic long term strategies that don’t require continuous human intervention or ‘good’ behavior to work.
Mark Bofill said @ur momisugly December 27, 2013 at 5:36 pm
According to one of the sources I quoted from above, we are already witnessing a mass extinction of up to 250,000 species per annum. Willis Eschenbach had already disparaged the possibility of such a figure elsewhere on this website. See: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/
It’s a very interesting and enlightening essay.
Climateace,
I’m expressing an opinion here, not making an argument I’m prepared to support. At least not at this time. 🙂
We need to get off this rock.
That’s the long term solution. It solves for humans driving species to extinction. It solves for catastrophic climate change. Solves for overpopulation, pandemics, asteroid strikes, megavolcano eruptions, destruction by superweapons, running out of resources, so on and so on. It has the potential for changing the dynamics that rule how we as a species interact with this world. That’s what we should be focusing on.
PG (can I call you that? I don’t want to call you Pompous Git, it seems rude),
I’m sorry, I got sidetracked. I’ll go back and re-read. Thanks.
Apropos government intervention in animal extinction
Here in Tasmania we have an estimated 1-200 breeding pairs of wedgetail eagles. Some 40% of their diet consists of feral cats. Feral cats threaten to render several species of small birds extinct, for example the diamond bird. The government has encouraged and sanctioned the building of sufficient windmills to send the wedgetail eagles extinct within a very short period (a decade or two). It would appear that the Labor/Green government of the state is predisposed toward the extinction of minor species such as wedgetail eagles and diamond birds.
@ur momisugly Mark Bofill
If I thought being called a Pompous Git was rude, then I would hardly have selected it as a pseudonym.
I was once called the syphilitic offspring of a mongoloid whore’s melt. My response was “You make me feel homesick. My mummy used to talk to me like that!”