Queensland Greens and Open Tickets

Queensland election update – less than a week before polling day.

Just Vote All?
Let’s examine the reasons for Campbell Newman’s Just Vote 1 strategy. Queensland state elections have optional preferential voting: you can number 1 or more candidates.

When it has suited the major parties, usually the one in the lead, they have adopted a Just Vote 1 strategy.

This makes it possible to win on a minority of the popular vote, and takes smaller parties out of the equation.

The ostensible reason for this strategy is it prevents a hung parliament. The UK has a first past the post system (essentially the same as Just Vote 1) and their last election delivered a hung parliament and the latest polls show that as the most likely outcome next time. So that is not a really plausible reason and in any case, up to Peter Beattie’s time, Just Vote 1 was the Labor strategy. Back then, the Libs and Nats were at each others’ throats. Times change and so, apparently, do principles when they no longer suit you.

Why does it suit the LNP now? After all, conservative minor parties and independents add up to a bit more than the Greens – depending which polls you believe. It’s a matter of marginals. The LNP will have done polling that shows they gain more from stifling preference flows from Greens to ALP than they lose from stifling preference flows to them from minor parties and independents on the right. I can’t find stats for past Queensland elections, but most other minor parties in the 2013 federal election had a roughly even split of preference flows to Labor – even if they were nominally on the right (possibly an indication of where Labor is positioned?).

So overall, Labor, who derive significant benefit from Greens preferences, loses out more than the LNP from Just Vote 1.

Labor is in a poor position to complain: optional preferential voting was introduced by the Goss Labor government and it worked for them when they could exploit the divide between the Liberals and Nationals.

Open Tickets: So What?
Meanwhile Labor is attacking Greens for issuing “open tickets”, i.e., How to Vote cards that tell the voter to make up their own minds. This is nothing new, and if we look at past elections, the effect has been pretty much that the ALP gets 80% of Greens preferences once they drop out irrespective of what is on the HTV.

Even in the 2012 election where ALP most certainly did not advocate Just Vote 1, nearly 70% of Labor voters (vs. nearly 80% of LNP voters) only marked 1 on their ballot. In doing so, they created the risk that if the Greens candidate came second, there would be insufficient ALP preferences to beat the LNP candidate.

50% of Greens voters also went for Just Vote 1 despite the fact that the Greens have never advocated this position. 80% of Greens preferences go to Labor.

What Labor should really do is to think about what it takes to be attractive to Greens voters, and focus on countering Just Vote 1.

They will win a lot more votes that way than going negative. Do the math: 50% of 80% is 40% of the total Greens vote (3-4% of the total vote) that is up for grabs as ALP #2 if they attack the Just Vote 1 strategy. For LNP, the extra votes they win if every Greens voter fills in every box is a quarter of Labor’s gain so no wonder they do not want everyone to fill in the entire ballot (stats from Anthony Green’s blog).

There is therefore absolutely no basis for the ALP complaint that Greens “open tickets” risk handing the election to LNP. The stats actually indicate that Labor voters are far more likely to behave in a way that is perverse to their interests.

The 20% of Greens voters who put LNP ahead of Labor are probably converts from LNP on enviro or other issues where Greens are ahead of Labor and aren’t going to put ALP ahead of LNP no matter what. What would Labor prefer? That these people stay with the LNP?

Labor meanwhile is issuing a call to “put LNP last” which implies filling in all the squares, and is getting huffy about anyone who suggests variants. No doubt they are worrying about confusing the message. If they had not invested so much in confusing voters before (like Peter Beattie’s Just Vote 1 campaign) they would have an easier time now. Their attempts at portraying the Greens as spoilers are not matched by the historical stats.

Australia and Xenophobia

In Australia, whenever a new leaky boat full of desperate asylum seekers shows up, it’s treated with hysteria in the media. If the government of the day doesn’t react with cruelty, it’s considered to be weak on border security. And every time the approach to dealing with asylum seekers wanders further from humanitarian norms, it’s lauded as a solution to he problem.

Well, is it? As former prime minister Malcolm Fraser put it:

no democratic Australia could ever impose penalties or hardships on refugees which could match the terror from which most of them flee

So even if deterrence could work, should Australia attempt that?

And, anyway, is the view that numbers spike when the policy softens and go down when it gets harsher valid?

Correlation isn’t causation. You have to look at the push factors as well, and those definitely are causation. More refugees at source = more arriving at destination. Nothing could be simpler.

Even with the latest increases the numbers are not that high by world standards. If you look at UNHCR stats, 2012 had the highest number of new refugees since 1999. Australian stats for boat arrivals peak in 1999-2000 when numbers at source previously peaked, and they shoot up again over the last year when the number of new refugees shot up.

Some refugee stats here show that Australia does not have a serious problem, and treating a relatively small number of arrivals as a huge crisis for national security is not warranted.

Why is it impossible for any party besides the Greens to be rational on this? Could it be because anything but xenophobic hysteria results in a media beat-up?

Here in South Africa, genuine illegal immigrants (mostly economic migrants from Zimbabwe) amount to 10% of the population, yet all sides of politics condemn xenophobia when it flares up. Australia only leads the world in one respect as far as refugees go: mainstreaming of xenophobia.

Anyway numbers don’t lie so let’s check them. The graph here shows the difference for each year between reported numbers for that year and the year before of refugees (I use the UNHCR’s refugee count, excluding categories like internally displaced persons and Palestinians who are less likely to arrive in a distant country) and boat arrivals in Australia. The UN numbers are for a calendar year, while the Australian reporting period is a financial year (1 July–30 June). This is not a bad thing however as a 6-month delay takes into account the time between a push factor and a boat arrival.

The graph illustrates that upticks in numbers arriving correspond closely to upticks in the number of refugees over the previous year. The green line is the difference between boat arrivals in Australia and the number the previous year, and the blue line is the difference between UNHCR reported numbers of refugees versus the previous year. The lines mostly correspond pretty well, with just the major uptick in refugees in 2006 failing to result in major change in boat arrivals. The 2006 increase may however have arisen from a reporting anomaly (see UNHCR Statistical Yearbook 2006, Chapter 2, p  pp 25–26) rather than a major change in real refugee numbers.

Eyeballing data is risky: we should really do the stats. So let’s look at whether the data correlates. The correlation coefficient is statistically significant: r=0.56, and if we do a t-test for significance, the p-value is 0.006. So yes, this is a real correlation that explains the data well. And we can assign a cause to it, so we are not guilty of assigning causality to a coincidence.

So couldn’t the John Howard “Pacific Solution” actually be the cause of the decline in boat arrivals? That started in 2001 when the number of boat people hit a peak. So let’s mark that on the graph. The red arrow points to the 2001 data point where we can see that the push factors were already declining. And the number of boat arrivals also declined. Given that the correlation is also also strong before 2001 (0.60, though we don’t have enough data points for statistical significance, p=0.057), it is unlikely that being tough on asylum seekers actually had a significant chilling effect on boat arrivals. The only data point that lends comfort to xenophobia is the apparent 2006 increase in refugees but as we have seen that is not a real increase (mostly Iraqi refugees of the 2003 war in Syria and Jordan who had not previously been counted).

Anyway I present the data for you to make up your own mind. To me it looks pretty clear that being harsh on asylum seekers is nothing more than bad politics, dragging the political discourse down to the gutter. Mainstream politics, it seems is presented with no alternative but to go this route for fear of vilification by the commercial media. The Greens are the only party of significance that has resisted the politics of fear and xenophobia. Good on them. I hope they do well this election.

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Further Reading

The Guardian has some useful stats on refugees here.

Sad Truth About Australia

When I moved to Australia from South Africa in 2002, I too had been conned by the Australian marketing machine. Of course there's the genuine stuff: the Anzac legend, Gallipoli, exploits in the world wars, and so on. But there’s also the latter-day myth: the bronzed Aussie crocodile wrestler, the nation that can take on any sporting code you can imagine and many you can’t and win, the nation that punches above its weight in wars. It’s that later bit that turns out just to be so much marketing spin.

The harsh reality is that the modern Australia is a nation of crybaby wieners.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

Australia is pretty low on the list of refugee destinations. Countries that really do it tough host millions of refugees (some of the worst as a consequence of bungled wars Australia took part in: Iraq, Afghanistan), and tens of thousands of boat people arrive on the Mediterranean shores of Europe every year. A few thousand people arrive by leaky boat at most in a bad year, and politicians of all stripes are falling over themselves to score points by thinking up new ways of being cruel to people who’ve lost everything. Never mind that seeking asylum is not illegal and Australia is a signatory to a convention that makes it explicitly illegal to punish asylum seekers.

The biggest wiener of all is leader of the federal parliamentary opposition, Tony Abbot, who portrays himself as tough, but he is constantly whining. Tony, here's a hint. Looking buff in a speedo doesn't make you tough. Taking on hard issues fearlessly does.

That takes me to another of Abbott’s can’t do issues, climate change.

Aussie politicians are constantly pushing the line that no problem is too easy, that we can’t rush out and be the first, that we can only punch below our weight. What was that again? Weren’t we supposed to punch above our weight? And in any case, this is all bolstered by a campaign of cowardly lies. The claim that Australia would be a world leader in carbon taxes for example is at least 20 years out of date, and about 15 countries have already put such a tax in place or have plans to do so by the end of 2011.

If it was only Tony Abbott, it wouldn’t be a problem, but the rest of his “Liberal” Party is just about as bad, except a small minority who are largely ignored by the media. And the ruling Labor Party is even more terrified of these issues: they bend to the wind whenever it emanates from Abbott’s rear end.

And far from the physicality portrayed in the movies and on TV, Australia a few years back reportedly overtook the US as the most obese country in the world (to be fair, WHO stats show that neither country is really the fattest in the world, but the numbers are scary nonetheless ... a newspaper got the facts wrong: who would have guessed?).

So there you have it. Australia today is not a nation of all-conquering warlike athletic crocodile hunters. It’s a nation of obese slugs who use their cars to move from the food court to the adjacent supermarket, that punches below its weight and is terrified of taking on hard issues.

I’m moving back to South Africa where the problems are tough but so are the people.

A bit strong?

I wrote this on the back of several days of back to back whining on talkback radio about asylum seekers, and letters in The Australian invoking the Anzac legend as a reason to be cruel to people who are desperate because they’ve fled danger only to be treated worse than criminals (who are entitled to an expeditious trial, not indefinite detention). The Australia of the Anzac legend, the real one, not the version of the whiners, is still there. I saw it in the Brisbane floods when so many people pitched in to help without prompting. There are genuine politicians here who have principles. It’s the constructed national psyche of the Hanson-Howard era that I find objectionable. There are plenty of real people who don’t share that view of Australianness. I just wish the mass media would give them the air time they give the whiners.

The Australian’s Resolve Cracks

The Australian last weekend published a lengthy defence of its position on climate change, claiming its editorial policy was never anti-science, with the following rather surprising wording emphasised:

THIS newspaper supports global action on climate change based on the science.

They published a letter from me, cutting much of the substance, so I present it in full here:

I read Graham Lloyd’s lengthy defence of this paper’s coverage of climate science (“Climate debate no place for hotheads” 4/12) with interest.

The Australian may have said all these things but in a context where denialists writing junk were not only given equal time with real scientists, but lauded as in the case of Ian Plimer, who was given an incredible free ride for his book which was torn to shreds once it was in the hands of scientists, rather than the hard right ideologues in your editorial offices. I am also reminded of the embarrassingly incorrect article, "Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh" (23/04/2008) by Phil Chapman, who claimed that a decline in the number of observed sunspots presaged an ice age. Current indications are that 2010 is likely to set a new record for overall annual temperature. So much for that.

This paper has a long history of promoting cranks and contrarians with no standing in the scientific community. If these people were correct of course it would be great that you were giving them space, but they have proved time and time again to be talking rubbish. So how do you consider it acceptable that you are giving them equal time? The argument that a contrarian position is owed equal time no matter how bereft it is of logic or factual support was invented by the tobacco industry in 1954 and is as valid today as it was then. If your editorial staff does not understand the difference between pro-industry propaganda and genuine scientific debate, you cannot claim to be a quality paper. Allowing cranks to present easily debunked pseudo-science ad nauseam is not a freedom of speech issue, it is a quality of journalism issue. In any case you are extremely selective on where this kind of bogus balance applies: you do not for example insist on allowing Trotskyites equal time on the business pages, no doubt on the basis that their theories haven’t worked in practice. Well, guess what. Neither have contrarian theories of climate.

If it is indeed this paper’s position that we should base our actions on the science, how about reporting the science without insisting on bogus balance of at least equal space for anti-science? How about some articles informing the public on exactly how uncertainty is deal with in science, rather than stoking the completely false claim that uncertainty in climate science renders the whole field invalid? There’s a lot you can do to defend your reputation without threatening litigation, and I suggest you start by understanding why many scientists hold you in contempt. A mirror can be a most useful tool.

I strongly recommend to anyone wanting to understand the nature of the propaganda war on science that started with tobacco, took on the ozone hole and is now attacking climate science to read the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. Oreskes is an accomplished science historian and her careful scholarship adds to the understanding of this topic I’ve built from my own experience in taking on other bogus anti-science battles in the past, including tobacco and AIDS denial, as well as reading other books like George Monbiot’s Heat.

More interesting to me though is why the paper has suddenly decided to defend its track record, questionable though its defence is: the paper’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, argues that the paper’s own editorials have consistently argued for a science-based approach, while ignoring the fact that allowing so much space for cranks undermines public understanding of the science. But why are they doing this? Do they care about their reputation after all?

Let’s consider one example, the common attack line of the anti-science warrior since the days of tobacco: undermine public confidence in scientific findings by harping on uncertainty, as if this is a sole property of this one area of applied science, and nothing can be done until all uncertainties are resolved. To anyone who does science of the real world, this is a patently absurd line of attack, but it is one that bought the tobacco industry decades, held up action on the ozone hole and caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary HIV deaths in South Africa. No real-world science is devoid of uncertainty; the biggest irony in this line of attack is that industries like oil that pay for anti-science activism deal with enormous uncertainties in their own line of work. It is beggars the imagination that the industry’s own scientists do not know how to manage uncertainty.

One editorial doesn’t do it for me: the paper will have to build a consistent track record of reporting well-founded scientific positions, and refusing to publish polemics disguised as science. Oh yes, and Graham Lloyd: Bjørn Lomborg isn’t an economist. His background is in political science.

It’s the environment, stupid

No matter how much The Australian may try to spin the palace coup against Kevin Rudd as arising from his mishandling of a proposed tax on mines, the big swing against Labor in the polls has consistently been towards the Greens.

I’m not sure in what universe The Australian lives, but in this one, people do not desert a ruling party for the Greens out of empathy with embattled miners, at risk of losing some of their massive profits to the public purse.

In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist James Carville hung a sign in his campaign headquarters:

The economy, stupid

Given that Labor campaigned in the 2007 election on taking climate change seriously and has achieved almost nothing, with an emissions trading scheme proposal weaker than the Howard administration’s, that has gone on the back burner, maybe they need a reminder:

The environment, stupid

Dealing with climate change

We have no option but to deal with climate change.

Either we deal with it or it will deal with us.

There is no serious challenge to the science behind climate change. The whole basis for the denial movement is not attacking the science, but attacking the scientists. Look for a real scientific paper attacking the science. There is a very small number of these, all of which have been debunked. Most other material is on blogs and the opinion papers of the mass media, replete with the language of personal attack. Climate scientists are "alarmists", "warmists", "catastrophists", and any other number of made-up appellations.

As with the tobacco and HIV denial movements, personal attack does not prevent the ultimate harm that denial of the facts causes.

Unlike tobacco and HIV, we are not talking about something that will ruin the lives of a few million people if not dealt with expeditiously. Rapid climate change is causing a rapid acceleration of extinction rates. The rapid depletion of the Himalayan glaciers threatens the food supply of a half a billion people: melt water from these glaciers feed major river systems of both India and China. And reduced agricultural output is likely to be worst in poorer countries.

Talk therefore of whether an emissions trading scheme should be contemplated in the absence of any serious alternative is crazy. The Australian government's scheme falls far short of any reasonable solution, but their main opposition is opposing it without offering an alternative.

Given that, how will climate change deal with Australia?

There are two possibilities: Australia's inability to face up to the problem could be a worldwide phenomenon, in which case we face a period of growing environmental disaster: death of the Great Barrier Reef, collapse of food supply in India and China, famine in Africa. If on the other hand the rest of the world gets its act together, Australia as the world's biggest coal exporter and the country with the highest per capita CO₂ emissions will be left high and dry, and as uncompetitive as a country that did not foresee the trend away from horse-based transport a century ago.

Monty Python Climate Change Phrasebook?

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has set up a blog, with the first topic for discussion climate change. One Malcolm has taken up the opportunity to post copious volumes of alleged “facts” that purport to show that the PM has failed to exercise “due diligence”. The blog bizarrely prevents posting of internet links of any sort making it hard to point directly at factual content to debunk this stuff.

I am guessing here at the specific book “Malcolm” has used as source material but I won't name it since he doesn't (he mentions the author's name, Plimer, but I don't have the book I’m thinking of in front of me so I will take it as Malcolm’s contribution; if anyone has the Plimer book, feel free to comment on the “Malcolm” interpretation).

This whole thing reminds me of the Monty Python Hungarian Phrasebook sketch, in which pranksters have published a phrasebook rendering commonly-used tourist questions from the original Hungarian into inappropriate English (e.g., “Can you direct me to the railway station?” in Hungarian is translated to “Please fondle my buttocks.”).

Let’s look at some of “Malcolm’s” quotes from his phrasebook (approximate page numbers from the PM’s blog; they shift around as responses go up):

• [p 85] The warmest year in modern times was 1934. The next three warmest were 1931, 1938 and 1939. All before humanity’s latest industrialisation with higher CO2 production. Other warm years: 1998, 1921, 2006, 1999 and 1953. Uh, no. The Hadley data set HadCRUT3 shows that 1998 was 0.7° warmer than 1934. The source of “Malcolm’s” error is NASA’s correction of their US data set, that has been misrepresented around the blogosphere as a significant change in worldwide trends. No data set that anyone takes seriously does not show significant warming over the twentieth century.
  
• [p 81] Other likely climate drivers in the solar system include variations in: solar system centre-of-gravity; sun’s centre of gravity; Earth's orbit and distance from sun; Earth’s axis tilt and precession; moon’s orbit; sun spot cycles and solar irradiance or energy output; ...........
  The IPCC’s mandate prevents considering these and other natural climate drivers. Why? The IPCC is not a scientific organisation, it’s political. Rubbish. Read the IPCC's report Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, easily found by searching for attribution of climate change, and you will find this claim is completely false.
  
• [p 89] Krakatoa’s 1883 volcanic explosion dwarfs humanity’s CO2. Nature rapidly absorbed Krakatoa’s sudden, huge CO2 into oceans and biomass, quickly rebalancing Earth’s atmosphere. False. Krakatau in 1883 is estimated to have produced 9.1x10¹¹ moles of CO₂. One mole of CO₂ is 44g so this amount of CO₂ is about 40-million tonnes. The latest figure I can find for total human carbon emissions is 8,230-million tonnes of carbon in 2006, or about 29-billion tonnes of CO₂. So in one year, total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are more than 700 times the amount Krakatau vented in 1883.
  

That’s all I have time for. Be assured, there is a lot more where these came from.

Australia’s shameful response to climate change

When Kevin Rudd announced a 5% target for emissions reductions for 2020, you could almost hear John Howard laughing from the political grave. It's small comfort to me that in discussing climate matters since then, a Labor supporter called Rudd “Howard” by mistake. Freudian?

The science the government has in front of it says you have to reduce emissions by 25% by 2020 to save the Great Barrier Reef. Of course Australia cannot achieve this on its own because it accounts for a relatively small fraction of worldwide emissions – even if you account for its role as the world’s biggest exporter of coal (about a third of worldwide exports).

Another thing not widely talked about is that carbon emissions accumulate. Around half are absorbed by the environment; the rest dissipates very slowly over centuries. That means that if we have not achieved a target by 2020 that stops CO₂ accumulating to 550 parts per million or more, we can’t just turn off the tap and expect the atmospheric CO₂ level to drop.

How soon will the rest of the world regard carbon emissions as a serious, urgent problem? That Europe has committed to a 20% cut by 2020 is some indication.

Why should Europe care more? Partially, it’s because Europe has a stronger tradition than English-speaking countries of taking science seriously. But another factor is Europe’s proximity to the Arctic. A growing number of scientists is predicting an ice-free Arctic summer by 2015. It was a big enough shock when it was reported in 2007 that the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by 2030.

So in a sense the self-styled sceptics are right. The science has enough uncertainties that we have to be cautious about accepting predictions without a wide allowance for error. The problem is, the majority of cases that are breaking out of the modelled predictions are on the worse rather than the better side. How is this possible? With the vast bulk of “sceptics” accusing scientists who predict anything remotely bad of being “alarmist”, the natural tendency of scientists to avoid alarming claims without overwhelming evidence is accentuated. So work predicting rapid ice cap loss for example is not getting the attention it should. Another example: concerns about the possibility of the urban heat island effect (UHI) skewing the temperature trend has resulted in NASA compensating for this effect. While it is true that a temperature sensor put next to an isolated hot spot would be bad for once-off measurement, if that hot spot is not constantly being hotter, it would not add a trend to the stats.

NASA eliminates local anomalies by a process called homogenizing, where temperatures of each station are in effect corrected for excessive variation beyond others in similar terrain.

Let’s look at how over-estimating the effect of UHI could have on the temperature trend. If NASA weights down temperatures from urban area, they could be underestimating the general increase in temperatures, because some of these areas could naturally be heating faster than their surroundings.

In conclusion, here’s an ad GetUp is running.

Climate Change, Peak Oil and the Meltdown

Some people are already talking about how mitigating climate change is a luxury that will have to await recovery from the economic meltdown. That is loser talk. Governments at least in countries with sound economic management that haven't run up massive debt can and should look at this as an opportunity for long-term infrastructure spending. And what better way to plan for the future than to reduce the future impact of higher energy costs and climate change mitigation?

Here are a few ideas for consideration. First, funding efficiency drives will gear the economy for future competitiveness.

Another idea is to fund free solar hot water for 100,0000 and free solar power for 40,000 low-income households (each at a cost of about $400-million); both would generate jobs and save poorer people money. Why is this a better idea than existing Australian state and federal rebates? Because there rebates cause no downwards price pressure; the price rises to whatever the market will bear. I've seen solar water heaters in South Africa for sale at less than the post-rebate price in Australia. If the government buys a large number of systems and pays for installation, the vendors will build economy of scale, then have to drop prices to continue with that scale in the broader unsubsidized market. To me this makes more sense than an ongoing price subsidy, the effect of which is to keep prices high.

Of course "free" doesn't mean no one pays for all this; it comes out of our taxes. But the same is true of roads, the vast majority of which don't have tolls. Building roads contributes to carbon emissions yet somehow "free" roads are acceptable to some, where a plan like this is seen as somehow wrong because someone is getting something for nothing. I wonder, do the same people argue that you can't mitigate climate change because the poor will suffer the most from extra costs of energy?

The government should support development of sustainable biomass and wind turbines on farms. Measures here could include direct subsidies and decent feed-in tariff policies for supplying clean energy to the grid. Both interventions would generate an income stream for farmers, reducing the pain of higher energy costs for their operations. Good for the environment, good for the economy. There are some interesting biofuels options out there. Legumes for example do not need nitrogen fertilizer. Peanuts are one of the oldest sources of biodiesel; better still are legumes that grow on land unsuited to food crops, such as the Pongamia tree.

Improved urban public transport should be another priority. Again, it creates more jobs, is better for the environment and reduces the impact of high energy costs on those on lower incomes. Add to this putting more services into outer suburbs to cut travel distances. Again good for the environment, good for the economy, good for those on low incomes.

Better inter-city rail is a longer-term project. But why not start planning now? What will we do when air travel becomes prohibitive? Already, fast trains are competitive in time for travel up to 1,000 km, allowing for the inconveniences of getting to and from airports and on and off planes. Europe and parts of the Far East already have this infrastructure; countries like Australia and the US need to catch up, otherwise they will be severely disadvantaged in sectors of the economy where medium-range travel is a significant cost.

All of this except the inter-city rail project that would be a longer-term project could be funded for less than the $10-billion the Rudd government is pumping into the economy mainly by cash handouts, as their response to the worldwide economic meltdown.

We have had a brief breather from high oil prices thanks to the financial meltdown, but don't expect it to last (prices are already heading up). Oil is not made by melting down markets ...

Lies, Damn Lies and The Australian

On 9 October 2008, The Australian's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, published an opinion piece expressing disappointment with both US presidential candidates. He attacked McCain in particular for his proposal to refinance bad mortgages at the level the house actually turned out to be worth to the tune of $300-billion as rewarding those who made bad decisions.

It seems that Obama pretty much agrees with Sheridan; I hope the latter will follow up with an article backing Obama.

In addition, for good measure, Sheridan repeated a criticism of Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, that has been doing the rounds on right-wing blogs:

And he said three weeks of US expenditure in Iraq equalled seven years of US expenditure in Afghanistan, which turns out to be completely wrong.

I posted the following response at a time when responses were still being taken:

Greg, Biden was comparing military expenditure in Iraq with nation-building expenditure in Afghanistan (not total expenditure in both cases). On that score he is about right. See CNN's fact check.

If his point was that at a fraction of the cost of the Iraq war, the Afghan exercise could have been completed, i.e., rebuilding the infrastructure and setting the country on its feet, he's dead right.

Guess what happened to my response? Actually you don't have to guess. Go to Sheridan's article and look for it. The Australian's editors hate to be pulled up on matters of fact. I've tried to do this on several occasions in the past, and they have simply ignored my correction. So here it is. Maybe a small fraction of the people who read the original article will see this. Then again, if they like Greg Sheridan and The Australian, they are not likely to worry about the facts spoiling a good argument.

Electric cars, trains or buses: which is cleanest?

There's been some debate in Australia in the wake of prime minister Kevin Rudd's announcement of financial backing for Toyota to build a hybrid Camry in Australia on whether hybrids represent a big saving in carbon emissions or not. This is an old debate, starting with a claim that a Toyota Prius's lifetime energy cost was higher than a big SUV, when you took into account manufacturing and the environmental cost of the battery.

That's an old story and well trawled over so there is little point in going over that again.

The bigger picture story is should we be fussing over conversion to electric cars or hybrids, when electricity is mostly generated from carbon emitting fossil fuels? An electric car or hybrid can add some efficiencies like regenerative braking, so it should overall have better efficiency than directly burning fossil fuels in the engine -- even if as in the case of a purely electric car or plug-in hybrid, it gets some power from fossil-fueled mains electricity.

I argue that instead, we should be looking at how to get as many people as possible into public transport. Even without changing the mode of energy, there are huge savings to be had there. If we work on an average of 50 litres/100 km for a diesel bus and 10 litres/100 km for a car, and 30 times as many people in the bus, the bus uses one sixth of the fuel per passenger, a saving of nearly 85%. A hybrid or small car will do significantly better, but a bus will still win easily, provided it is reasonably full. A train may not do better because electricity in most countries is mostly generated from very dirty sources, with a relatively low efficiency. A diesel engine may have an efficiency of up to 45% (with the rest wasted as heat); a coal power plant may be as low as 30%. Add in transmission losses, and an electric train is getting quite low value for the emissions produced -- though still significantly better than a car carrying the typical 1.5 people.

Buses then are the obvious quick fix. But as with cars, they have the problem that every bus has to be changed once improved technology is available.

Longer-term, trains are a better strategy to pursue, because cleaning up power generation for them fixes every train.

So, should the Australian government be encouraging local manufacture of hybrids? I do not see any great harm in it. But it is really only a very small part of the solution. The big ones are encouraging more use of public transport, putting in more train lines and services and cleaning up power generation.

Science, Governments and Industrial Impact

The still new Rudd government in Australia has announced deep cuts in funding for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), one of the few research bodies to receive consistent funding under the previous anti-intellectual Howard government.

The CSIRO and to a lesser extent universities are suffering from the misplaced desire by governments for research entities to function as commercial operations. If what they were doing had a clear and obvious low-risk commercial outcome, business would be doing it.

The purpose of government funded research is longer-range outcomes which may not have immediate economic impact but when they do turn into something economically viable are game-changing. At Stanford, rightly acknowledged as a world leader in not only blue sky research but in industrial outcomes, the university does not try to hoard IP. If a grad student or academic has a great commercialisable idea, they are encouraged to go out and start a business.

By trying to merge the concepts of blue sky research (needs the stability of a large organisation with deep pockets) and innovative start-ups (need the nimbleness of a small organisation without deep bureaucracy) you end up with neither.

As to the question of the Rudd government's commitment, look no further than the "means test" on solar panels. This is a government which is focused on what it takes to win the next election, not what makes sense for the environment, academia, or anything else long term – despite anything they say to the contrary.

But back to the CSIRO.

From what I know of the organisation, it does some really good work, but has an excessively bureaucratic culture, with an emphasis on booking everything against a project, whether it makes sense to do so or not. This emphasis arises from a desire to appear to be operating "commercially".

What should a government wanting to make best use of a resource like this do?

I would take away the imperative to commercialise, and institute benchmarks similar to those for research academics. I would base funding on outcomes against these benchmarks. Some of these benchmarks would include long-term impacts (e.g., the fraction of research that resulted in a commercial outcome; the fraction of research that was highly cited). But I would not require that the organisation itself do the commercialising. If the CSIRO publishes some breakthrough concept which results in a major new business being started, why should the government care who owns the business, as long as there's a return to society?

The same applies to universities. The University of Queensland proudly compared its income for patents and royalties with that of Stanford, at a talk I attended a few years ago. However, that's not how Stanford operates. The university seldom tries to claim ownership of IP. Academics and grad students have formed many successful start-ups (HP, Sun, SGI, FedEx, to name a few).

The big difference in the US which makes the Stanford approach work well for them is the generous tradition of alumnus donations. However, even without this, a switch to separating commercialisation from research would be beneficial. In the absense of donations, the government could add successful spin-outs as a factor in funding research.

By making this change, the CSIRO – and universities – could revert to doing what a large government funded organisation does best: providing job security for those developing ideas for the long term. Unfortunately, cutting funding without a structural change is likely to have the opposite effect: an increased emphasis on commercial outcomes.