Earthsharing

The Goyder Line, Climate Change and Marginal Land

Karl FitzgeraldJune 3, 2009Articles1 Comment

The infamous Goyder Line raises important issues for those concerned about climate change. The climate’s influence in drastically increasing the amount of marginal land and the flow through effects this will have on wages, communities and common sense are important issues we should all understand. Our unique commentary follows…

Charles Gent from Inside Story

THE MODEST historic marker in a dusty lay-by just north of Melrose purports to sit on Goyder’s Line, but the locals aren’t so sure: some think it should be a kilometre or so to the south. In sixty years time, if the grimmest projections of climate change science are right, this will be the driest of arguments. Projections say that by 2070, Goyder’s Line, regarded as the northern edge of South Australia’s arable land since the late nineteenth century, could have migrated as far south as Clare, 120 kilometres away.

The Line has been part of South Australian folklore and vocabulary for nearly 150 years. Early vineyards were already thriving in the Clare Valley when South Australia’s surveyor-general, George Woodroofe Goyder, headed north through the town at the behest of the colony’s government in 1865. Goyder made an extended tour of the mid-north to map the extent of a fierce drought. As he painstakingly traversed the landscape on horseback, he made a shrewd and, it would later emerge, remarkably accurate assessment of the limits of reliable rainfall. He relied primarily on cues provided by soil and vegetation types, particularly the zone of transition from native grass and woodland to drought-tolerant saltbush. His imaginary line turned out to be, in effect, an isopleth; north of his line, average annual rainfall averaged less than 300 millimetres (or twelve inches), which to Goyder’s mind made the prospects for settled agriculture too risky to be contemplated.

With the lack of rainfall already showing signs of increasing the amount of marginal (barely arable) land, Charles Gent raises the prospect of South Australia’s farming land decreasing by approximately 20 – 30% within 60 years.

How will this effect wage earners?

With less land to farm on, the competition for those few sites down near the coast that benefit from weather patterns off the Great Australian bite will result in higher land prices. With less overall productive land, there will be greater competition between workers.

This double edged sword will reveal itself in lower wages and higher land (and thus housing) costs.

With the increased automation of mines (remote controlled mining is not far away), rural employment will be sparse. Urban drift will accelerate rapidly as permafrost melts increase. Environmental refugees are destined to accelerate. The negative feedback loops are accelerating.

How will we afford the infrastructure to re-design communities into walkable, sustainable, affordable communities?

All these factors place a premium on urban land. With our tax system ignoring the naturally increasing scarcity rents that accrue to land, the wealth gap is destined to accelerate. If the Henry Tax Review ignores these issues, future generations face the daunting prospect of paying 50% of their wages on somewhere to live. Understand why

Funding our Future

Karl FitzgeraldJune 1, 2009CommentaryLeave a Comment

photo credit: publik15

Renegade Economist Podcast 91

As broadcast on the almighty 3CR on Wed May 27th, 2009.
Subscribe to the podcast

Funding our Future: Age journalist and Co-Editor Dissent magazine Kenneth Davidson discusses deficit misnomers, the French reclaimation of public water rights and the debt trap cost-hello engineered.

Show Notes:
JOAR – Uranium Corporation of India Ltd stolen land at Jadugoa, but govt forcing them to pay the Land Tax.  
Thailand – Land tax seen as a tool to reduce land holdings of the rich

Economic Trickery Award of the week – FHOG goes International – US Treasury now providing a $8000 tax credit to subsidise property market.

GMO Banned for 5 years in Tas
David Llewellyn MP, Press Release:

Tasmania’s ban on the release of genetically modified organisms to the environment will continue for at least another five years under a Bill passed by Parliament.

Permits would double money given to business
In its annual report on government assistance to industry, the Commission says the $8.2 billion hand-outs originally proposed for carbon-intensive firms in 2011-12 would virtually double Federal Government spending on industry support. Even under the Howard government, it says, budget spending and tax breaks for business shot up from $5.1 billion to $8.4 billion in the five years to 2007-08.

The Rudd Government’s spending plans for research and development, the car industry and the farm sector would add another $20 billion in coming years, it says. But the emissions trading scheme would put all that in the shade.

The commission says free permits to emission-intensive firms alone would cost taxpayers $6.5 billion in 2011-12 under the original plans — now postponed for two years due to the global financial crisis.
…
The Government says the free permits are needed to stop firms shifting production to countries without carbon caps — “carbon leakage” — and the Coalition and industry say they are not generous enough. But the Commission says they will be too expensive and wasteful, and make other firms bear the burden of reducing emissions.

“Policies that counteract carbon leakage will most likely transfer the abatement task to other sectors,” it warns. “This will impose additional costs on other firms that must buy permits to emit greenhouse gases.”
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Bollier on The Great Seabed Enclosure

Karl FitzgeraldMay 27, 2009CommentaryLeave a Comment

David Bollier, author of the recently released Viral Spiral, on yet another aspect of the privateers’ frontiers:

A few years ago, Russia sent a submersible craft 4 kilometers beneath the North Pole to plant a titanium flag on the floor of the ocean. Its purpose: to stake a claim on the continental shelf where there may exist oil, gas and methane hydrates, a mineral deposit that can be a source of energy.

While not all nations imitate the galleons of the 18th Century in planting a flag in the name of a nation, dozens of countries around the world are now staking serious claims for huge swaths of the ocean floor. As The Economist magazine describes it, (thanks for James Quilligan for passing this along!), the latest land grab is inspired by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea adopted in 1982. Under the Convention, nations that ratified the treaty by May 13, 1999, had ten years in which to assert claims over specific tracts of the ocean floor that lay beyond the customary 200 nautical miles from shore.

FHOG Goes International ;(

Karl FitzgeraldMay 25, 2009CommentaryLeave a Comment

photo credit: Hamed Parham

The First Home Owners Grant nightmare continues, with elements of it borrowed and extended by the American HUD. Young US home dreamers will suffer like we have:

Two new applications of the federal tax incentive for first time homebuyers – allowing them to use the $8,000 credit for down payments and on land contracts -will allow more people to take advantage of the purchase incentive, said housing industry experts.

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan announced this month that Federal Housing Administration-approved lenders could monetize the tax credit through short-term loans so that buyers could use it for down payments.

The American twist is that land bankers can also benefit from it. As commented on time and again via this blog, the First Home Owners Grant should be re-named the Home Sellers Subsidy. If everyone gets $8,000, then the price of land and housing goes up at least $8,000. The same can be seen for most markets, with the $2000 subsidy for LPG car fit outs increasing the price by the same amount. Reports are coming through that the $1600 Home Insulation subsidy is having similar effects there too.

The US article goes on to quote the glee in the real estate industry:

Matt Dejanovich, a Realtor with Real Estate One in Ann Arbor, said being able to apply the tax credit toward down payments would have an immediate impact. That’s because, he said, many potential buyers who would quality for the credit and have secured loans just don’t have the cash on hand for down payment and closing costs.

“If there was a way to get your hands on that money at the closing table, I could sell a house this afternoon,” he said.

With 19 million vacant homes existing and half finished houses being bulldozed throughout the US, the last thing they needs is more urban sprawl. That is what the extension of the tax credit will do to the land market.

Lobbyists win again. Real estate agents should be called Fffffantasy Agents. Who is standing up for the rights of young American families? Economic trickery will only be outlawed when people have a decent understanding of economic forces. Listen to our podcast.

The Economics of War – Cutting Natural Resources Out of the Equation

Karl FitzgeraldMay 25, 2009Articles, Progress Magazine1 Comment

photo credit: gruntzooki

David Smiley

– Research Associate in the Department of Economics at Macquarie Uni

In a previous article we tracked the failures of massive international efforts to reduce four global problems: poverty, human rights abuses, the degradation of the planet, and war. We asserted that these four problems cannot be solved separately and that none can be solved without land reform. We started with war, surveying theories of conflict offered by psychology, sociology, history, politics and economics. We concluded that they had little relevance beyond western society, and that they paid insufficient attention to conflict over land and natural resources. In the present article, though we will examine a surprisingly wide range of actual conflicts, we will find, in nearly all cases, wars are fought over some form of dispute over land. In the next article we will compare methods of conflict resolution.

INTERNATIONAL WARFARE
Imperialism has been defined as the control by one country over the territory of others, and with colonialism as its main form of implementation. In Africa and Latin America colonists simply pushed native populations into progressively less fertile land until they were forced to leave their traditional lifestyles and work for wages on the colonists’ estates. In other parts of the world, such as India, this process had already been completed by hereditary princes who now had to pay taxes to the invading imperial powers. As Edward Said, in his book on imperialism, said: “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course”. Neo-imperialism can be defined as the control by one country over the energy and mineral resources of others. (See Ideological wars).

International wars. The realist school of international relations contends that the nation-state system is essentially a war system. Political clout, weaponry, national pride and diplomacy all give shape to wars, but the cause is always in relative deprivation of land and natural resources. National borders, the basis of sovereignty, have resulted from previous wars or from arbitrary subdivision. For example, in Africa and the Middle East many borders follow lines of longitude and latitude running through uninhabited desert. But straddling these lines are quite different, and therefore contested, borders around immense reservoirs of oil, gas and water. And where these extend under the sea, or under the ice, new forms of resource rights and resource conflict emerge.

Ideological wars. Those of fascism and communism have, for the time being, faded and been replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist form of warfare. Since this appears to have taken western social sciences completely by surprise, we will tread carefully here, noting only some implications of resource exploitation and leaving an analysis of western responses to the next article. The realist school of international relations sees the emergence of Islamism as two responses to economic and social changes following the arrival of Western oil companies. The internal response arises from Islam’s approval of hospitality and sharing, and its disapproval of greed. These Islamic values are seen as contradicted by those who now collect and hoard rentier wealth, a leisure class of elite sheiks, who must be overthrown.

The external response to the west reflects Islam’s humiliations: previous humiliations from western colonial intrusions, and new humiliations from western culture and from western superior technology and economic organization Both are responses to a threat to destabilize a powerful religious, cultural and very traditional society, and both concern the rent of natural resources. In May 2008 Osama Bin Laden then put land in the forefront of this whole debate, claiming that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was at the heart of the Muslim battle with the West.
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