David Pecotic

Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.

Or at least the not completely Untimely …

Prof. Hudson’s tour pushed the team – we endeavour to return you to our regularly scheduled program minus technical glitches soon.

Web 2.0:

data.australia.gov.au – beta
[The Gov 2.0 Taskforce has launched a website that brings together around 59 datasets from Australian Federal, State and Territory governments released under licenses that permit reuse.

Alongside the launch the Taskforce announced on their blog the launch of a Mash-up competition challenging Australian developers to use one of more of the datasets to create a useful online application.]

Find Where Stimulus Money Got Spent In Your Area
[Land value uplift in action: the Economic Stimulus Plan site lets you search for projects in your area by postcode or address, neatly dropped onto a Google map. You can also filter the list by project type, finding out what’s been spent on rail in your area or how many applications for various subsidies have been lodged.]

Inflation Calculator
[Over at their Betaworks, the ABS has developed some mockups of a personal inflation calculator for you to try out and comment on - seems pertinent ...]

Web 2.0: The New Tools for Democratic Conversations – A snapshot of Initiatives in Government
[And in case your wondering what all this Web 2.0 stuff is all about, the Victorian Government has put together this handy summary of national and international developments.]

House prices: Safe as houses | The Economist
[Compare countries' house-price data over time.]

Climate Interactive
[A climate simulator that started life in a doctoral dissertation is being adopted by negotiators to assess their national greenhouse-gas commitments ahead of December's climate summit in Copenhagen. Dubbed C-ROADS — for Climate Rapid Overview and Decision-support Simulator — the tool translates complex climate modelling into readily digestible predictions. It allows policy-makers — and we, the public, through this simplified version, to see the likely consequences of their decisions immediately. See Instant climate model gears up : Nature News ]

National:

If climate change destroys your property, who should pay?
[A round-up - where climate change and Geonomics converge ...]

Ross Garnaut warns PM on stimulus as surprise jobs rebound points to faster rate hikes
[On the promotional trail for his new book, The Great Crash of 2008, Garnaut warns that by further fuelling excess spending the Rudd government's budget stimulus will have to be followed by "hard times" and lower living standards that the government has "barely begun to contemplate". Among other things, he points to problems with the "Australian bailout", from the guarantee for wholesale bank borrowing to foreign bank subsidiaries, state governments, mortgage securities, commercial property and the bigger first-home buyers subsidy.]

Seats to Professor Michael Hudson’s presentations (Oct 14 – 27) are filling fast, with major PR next week to fill the remaining spots. The renowned US economist is set to leave ears burning on why a decade of record economic …

photo credit: Listener42

George Monbiot writes another sterling piece, this time dispelling population as the bugbear of global warming. Click …

Renegade Economists Podcast 108

As broadcast on www.3CR.org.au 30/09/09.
Subscribe to the podcast.

Free Trash of Freeport: We finish off our climate friendly policy overview, then interview Nick Chesterfield (Manukoreri) and Nicholas Taylor (Outcrop) to discuss the immense wealth and destruction flowing from West Papua’s $40bn Freeport mine. Photo – Freeport’s tailings, thanks SkyTruth.

Key Articles:
Red River: The blacklisting of Rio Tinto:
Will Australia Allow Another Balibo at Freeport

Show Notes
Carbon Trading Controversies – speculative middlemen aka the bankers bonanza implicit in Australia’s Emissions Trading System

Contraction & Convergence – Aubrey Meyer. Also his book

Carbon Tax – James Hanson (NASA) supports

Tax Upstream

We propose to tax fuels as far upstream as practicable, i.e., at the point where possession of the carbon-bearing fuel passes from the “producer” (e.g., coal mine; oil wellhead or tanker; gas wellhead) to the immediate next entity in the supply chain (e.g., coal shipper or utility; oil refiner or importer; natural gas pipeline). Presumably, each such transfer will be codified in a contract, or at least a bill of lading, specifying the attributes of the fuel.

This will minimize the number of points in the economy at which the tax would be levied. It will also simplify tax treatment of potential downstream carbon control technologies such as CCS (coal capture and sequestration), as discussed below.

Carbon Variability Requires Taxing by Btu, not by Fuel Weight or Volume
The tax rates will be stated in dollars per million Btu of heat content for each fuel. A more familiar approach based on physical
quantities of fuel isn’t tenable, due to wide natural variations in carbon content within each fuel type. These variations are most stark for coal. A ton of lignite typically contains around 40% less carbon than a typical ton of bituminous coal, for example. To tax the two respective tons at the same dollar rate would be grossly unfair since combustion of the lignite ton releases 40% less carbon into the atmosphere than for the bituminous ton.

Freeport, West Papua
Caroline Lucas (MEP – Greens) West Papua speech – October 17th 2008
Just as they have never received a penny of the massive profits turned over by Freeport, whose Indonesian subsidiary last year paid the Indonesian government over 1.8 billion dollars in tax.

Genocide by Demographics
According to Dr Elmslie, highland Papuans who allegedly have gonorrhoea are being treated in UN-funded family planning clinics — but not for gonorrhoea. They are being injected instead with long-term contraceptive drugs. As Dr Elmslie notes, this goes some way to explaining why the 1.67 percent population growth rate for Melanesian Papuans in West Papua is so much lower in than over the 2.6 percent population growth rate for Melanesian Papuans over the border in Papua New Guinea (PNG). (Meanwhile, the growth rate for the non-Papuan population in West Papua is 10.5 percent.)

Music

Songs for West Papua – Kelly Newton-Wordsworth
War is not over – Kelly Newton-Wordsworth