John Quiggin

According to Steve Lewis in the Daily Telegraph

CONSUMERS will be slugged with price rises on everyday items like milk, cheese, chocolate and pizza’s as the carbon tax puts the squeeze on retailers and producers

(the apostrophe in pizza’s suggests News may have cut the subediting budget a bit too far). He illustrates with a picture of a mother of three who is currently paying $300 a fortnight for groceries.

Steve can’t say how much, and neither can his sources, though they are happy to give scary quotes. So, instead he quotes some big-sounding numbers derived from the Dept of Climate Change analysis. Woolworths, for example, will pay around $73 million a year in higher electricity costs. That certainly sounds like it would put a dent in the household budget. As the old saying has it, a million here, a million there, pretty soon you’re spending real money. That’s where Lewis leaves the story

But those of us capable of primary school arithmetic can take things a little bit further. There are 20 million or so people in Australia, so the cost amounts to aroun $3.50 a year, or 7 cents a week for us. For the archetypal (if unrepresentative family of four) that’s around 30 cents a week or 60 cents a fortnight (an increase of 0.4 per cent for the mother in the example). Looking at the illustrative photo, that’s rather less than the difference between the Kleenex tissues in the shopping trolley and the home brand alternative.

For a validity check on the impact, we could look at Woolies’ total sales of around $18 billion a year. A cost increase of $73 million is approximately 0.4 per cent. Of course, this doesn’t really get to the right answer either, because it doesn’t take account of changes in the wholesale cost of goods (so-called Scope 3 emissions).

But doing the analysis at an aggregate level fixes this pretty well. A tax at $26/tonne will raise around $10-$12 billion, depending on exemptions and particularly on the treatment of petrol. That’s about 2.5 per cent of total household expenditure on goods services, meaning that the gross impact of the carbon tax will be about a quarter that of the GST (note however, that the GST was offset, for goods, by the removal of Wholesale Sales Tax). The increase will be greater than this for energy services (electricity, gas and so on), and therefore must be less on non-energy goods. Overall, it’s safe to predict that the impact on grocery bills and similar items will be around 1 per cent.

Over the fold, I’ll do the cents per week exercise for all of Lewis’ examples when I get a moment

Time for another Monday Message Board, but we’re enjoying a long weekend, at least in Brisbane where the miserable weather of last week, forecast to continue for several days more, has disappeared. I’d welcome thoughts about the monarchy, honours lists and so on, and would also be interested to hear from readers affected by the volcanic ash clouds.

I’m tightening up on the civility rules and will, from now on, delete anything I regard as personal criticism of another commenter, along with coarse language. As usual, save long rants, extensive debates with other commenters, and repetition of old themes for an appropriate sandpit.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but Stephen Lacey at Grist (via David Spratt on Twitter) has done much of the job for me, and better than I could have. The crucial point is that the cost of solar photovoltaic electricity has fallen dramatically and is almost certain to fall further. In particular reaching the point where it is the cheapest large-scale alternative to carbon-fuelled electricity generation, and competitive (at reasonable carbon prices and in favorable locations) with new coal-fired power.

This makes for some fundamental changes in the debate over climate change and mitigation, even as it reaffirms the central point that advocates of mitigation have made all along, namely that, with an appropriate policy response, the costs of drastic reductions in carbon emissions will be modest in relation to national or global income.

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While we are on the subject of charitable giving, a reader has sent in a link to the Giving one percent website of a non-profit group trying to create a culture of charitable giving. Well worth a visit!

It’s been a while since we’ve had a fundraiser here, but a great opportunity has just come up. I’ll be attempting a half-marathon as part of the Brisbane Running Festival on 7 August, and there’s an associated fundraiser for the Queensland Cancer Council, which promotes research, awareness and support services. So, I’ve created a webpage for my effort here, where you can donate money (before June 30 if you want to claim it in this year’s tax return!).

A good fundraiser needs a good gimmick, so here goes. I completed my first[1] half-marathon run a week ago, in a time of 1:59:24, staying just ahead of the 2:00:00 pacerunner (someone who runs with a balloon or flag at a steady pace so others can keep pace) the whole time. I was pretty tired and sore by the time I finished – it’s not what you would call a fun run! This time, I want a commitment device to push me to run at 1:55 (or even better!). So, for each $1000 I can raise before race day, I’ll commit my best effort to stay a minute ahead of the 2:00:00 pacerunner. If I can raise $5000, I’ll run at the 1:55 pace as long as I can[2]. And, if there’s $10 000, I’ll try for 1:50, which will really push me to the limit.

I’ll start the ball rolling by promising to give $200 for each minute below 2:00 hours. So, you only need to give $800 to push my time down.

This is a great chance for everyone. If you enjoy the free commentary I’ve provided, please say thanks by giving whatever you can afford. If I’ve annoyed you, toss some money into the pot, and you can enjoy a Sunday morning lie-in thinking about me struggling to keep a punishing pace (at least for a middle-aged academic) over 21.1 km.

I’ll provide regular updates, and thanks to contributors, except for those who prefer to give anonymously.

fn1. I also did one in 2010, but I had to walk a fair bit, so I don’t think it counts.
fn2. No guarantees, as I’ll slow down if I’m feeling knee damage, but I’ll do my best to push on through exhaustion.

One great thing about soccer, at least for me, is that it is possible, and (by contrast with other sports where this can theoretically occur) relatively common, to score for the other side[1], thereby giving the language the phrase “own goal”. While not an own goal, I certainly had a missed shot with my prediction back in 2007 that the Liberals would never win another federal election. Technically, I’m still in the clear – the prediction that they would merge with the Nats before regaining office was right for the Queensland parties and may turn out correct at the national level – but the underlying analysis posited that Labor would remain politically dominant at both the Federal and State (except NSW) level for years to come. That prediction was derailed by a spectacular series of own goals on the part of the Labor Party, including

* WA Premier Carpenter’s decision to allow ministers to resume contact with Brian Burke
* The NSW government’s suicidal pursuit of electricity privatisation, thereby turning a defeat that was already inevitable (given past own goals) into a rout
* The Bligh government’s similarly suicidal program of asset sales
* Federal Labor’s dumping of the ETS, followed by the dumping of Kevin Rudd

While there is no particular disaster to explain the narrow defeat of the Victorian Labor government, spillovers from the Federal level probably did enough damage to make the difference.

But after only a short period in office, it seems that both the NSW and Victorian Coalition governments are scoring own goals on a regular basis. In Victoria (as at the Federal level) there have been huge blowups over senior ministers missing Parliamentary votes. And NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, having campaigned as cuddly and unthreatening, made a huge mistake when he tried to retrospectively reduce the feed-in tariff paid to people who had, in good faith, invested in the previous government’s solar PV scheme. He followed that up by ramming through Parliament anti-union legislation that had not been mentioned in the campaign. Given how far Labor’s stocks have sunk, mistakes like this probably won’t be crucial. But a government that manages to mess up what should be its honeymoon period is unlikely to last for long.

For political analysis, the “own goals” phenomenon presents a serious problem. If you want to estimate things like election outcomes you have to work on the basis of things that are more or less predictable, like economic conditions, ideological positions and so forth. Implicitly, this assumes that politicians do the best they can to win, given the objective circumstances. But if political outcomes are driven primarily by unforced errors like those I’ve mentioned, then predictability goes out the window.

fn1. In Australian football, it is, for course, very common to rush the ball through your own goal for a behind, scoring 1 point for the other side, but preventing a goal worth 6 points.

I wrote a while ago that most of the denialists touting the line that “there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995″ wouldn’t know a t-statistic if it bit them[1]. There’s an even better example in the Letters page of today’s Fin, where JL Goldsworthy of Woorim writes “A carbon tax will save about 0.00001 per cent of anthropogenic emissions, if that”.

We can easily check this estimate. Australia is currently responsible for about 2 per cent of global emissions, and the carbon tax is intended to reduce emissions to 5 per cent below 2000 levels (a target that Tony Abbott also ostensibly supports). Business as usual growth will be at least 25 per cent, so the policy goal is an emissions cut of 30 per cent. Primary school arithmetic tells us that 0.02*0.3 = 0.006 or 0.6 per cent. That is, JL Goldsworthy of Woorim is out by a factor of 60 000.

While this is an extreme case, it’s pretty much routine for the rightwing side of the climate debate. Ludicrous numbers like Goldsworthy’s can be found on just about any rightwing blog you care to visit. I’ve pointed out similarly massive errors by Andrew Bolt, Greg Hunt and Terry McCrann among others.

And they don’t care. The point of the debate is not to get things right but to keep up a steady supply of talking points so that those who have been sucked in by the delusions their opinion leaders spout never catch up with the refutations.

Update Unsurprisingly, this number appears to come from the ludicrous, but dangerous, Alan Jones, already notable for the corruption of Cash for Comment, and for his promotion of race riots, thankfully a rare phenomenon in Australia. It’s hard to say anything good about Jones. But the “respectable” right, exemplified by David Flint and John Howard, embrace and defend him. And not a single self-described “sceptic” has tried to correct this absurd and dishonest claim. If there is a single person on the anti-science side of the debate who cares in the slightest for truth, this is an ideal opportunity to step forward – Bob Carter, Ian Plimer, Don Aitkin and William Kininmonth come to mind as candidates.

fn1. The minority who do know what statistical significance means, and keep circulating this spurious (and now factually false) talking point are even worse. I’ll come back to them in another post.

At afternoon tea yesterday, one of my colleagues raised the point that, particularly in Europe, the prefix neo- is automatically taken to be pejorative, with neo-liberal as the obvious illustration. It struck us that the corresponding, positively weighted prefix is post- , as in post-Keynesian, post-Communist and so on. [1]

My thought on this is it reflects an underlying progressivist assumption, shared even by many people who would reject explicit claims about historical progress. Given this assumption “post-X” is good, since it represents an advance on X, while “neo-X” is bad since it represents a reversion to X, implying the existence of some Y which must be post-X.

Feel free to provide counterexamples, contrary explanations and so on.

The once unthinkable prospect that US government debt might lose its AAA rating has suddenly become a real possibility. In fact, it now seems about as likely as not. The problem is not so much “can’t pay” but “won’t pay”. The US, like quite a few other countries, has some fairly serious fiscal imbalances, but they aren’t pressing in the short run, and there is plenty of capacity to raise additional revenue or cut spending so as to stabilise the ratio of debt to GDP at a sustainable level.

The problem is that even with a stable debt/GDP ratio the total value of outstanding debt keeps growing and the US Congress requires periodic votes to approve this. They are usually the occasion for some grandstanding, but this time the Republican majority of the House of Representatives is seriously threatening a refusal, unless the Democrats agree to massive (and still unspecified) spending cuts. The due date for raising the debt ceiling passed a while ago, but an actual default is being staved off by some sharp accounting tricks, which will apparently work until 2 August. The other day, to prove they are serious, the Repubs introduced a motion for an increase in the debt ceiling, with the express purpose of voting unanimously against it, which they did.

At this point, loud alarm bells have started ringing for the big ratings agencies, Standard&Poors and Moodys. They will have to decide, well before August, whether to downgrade US government debt and if so by how much.
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It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. In keeping with my attempts to open up the comments to new contributors , I’d like to redirect discussion, and restatements of previous arguments, as opposed to substantive new contributions, to the sandpit(s). In particular, please post nothing related to nuclear energy. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

The Risk and Sustainable Management Group, which I lead at the University of Queensland, launched our Annual Report for 2010 last night (link to large PDF coming soon). I’ll quote from the Foreword

As 2009 drew to a close, it seemed reasonable to expect that 2010 would see a resolution of the Australian political debate over the two environmental issues central to the work of the Risk and Sustainable Management Group: climate change and the management of the Murray–Darling Basin.

In the event, neither of these issues was resolved. The bipartisan agreement in support of an emissions trading scheme collapsed, and the policy was abandoned by the government. Following the August 2010 election, the government restated its support for a carbon price, but the main short-term focus was on the idea of a carbon tax.

Developments in water policy were equally confused. Under the Water Act 2007, passed by the Commonwealth Parliament with bipartisan support, the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) was required to produce a plan for the sustainable management of the Basin. The release of the Basin Plan was delayed by the election. The MDBA produced a Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan in October 2010 which met with a very hostile response, with copies of the Guide being burned at public meetings of irrigators. The Draft Plan is still under development.

I’m feeling a bit more hopeful about carbon prices than when I wrote that. Labor, Greens and the Independents seem to be holding together, and the public debate shows some increasing recognition that Abbott is an opportunistic hack and that while preferring prejudice to science may make for good talkback radio, it is not a good basis for public policy.

By contrast, the situation regarding the Murray Darling Basin has gone from bad to worse to pretty much hopeless. We had everything needed for a plan that made just about everyone better off: more water for the environment, a good deal for farmers who wanted to switch out of irrigation, no compulsory acquisition, and enough spare money sloshing into country towns to more than offset any reduction in agricultural output. Instead, the process was spectacularly mishandled, most notably by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, who managed to scare everyone into thinking the government was about to confiscate their water. That handed power back to the most reactionary irrigator lobby groups who just want to stay on the old, unsustainable, path as long as possible, while extracting as much money as they can from the public purse. The release yesterday of the Windsor Report suggests that they will get their wish. The central point of the report is that the government should abandon all “non-strategic” purchases of water, while pouring even more money into so-called “water-saving” schemes, which will cost 5-10 billion while delivering little if any additional water.

Perhaps there is a way back from this but I can’t see it at present. For the next couple of years, at least, I plan to give up (or at least scale down) my work on the Basin and focus on more tractable problems like stabilising the global climate, saving the Great Barrier Reef and fixing financial markets.

One of the big frustrations with trying to follow the debate on climate change is that most of the key questions are best answered with large, complicated models. Learning enough to assess these models in one subject area, even in general terms, is a huge task, and learning the details of any particular model is a full-time occupation. But, if we are going to make any real progress, we need numbers we can understand. It seems hopeless, but it isn’t entirely so. One thing I learned very early on about modelling is that, for almost any large complicated model, there’s a small simple model that gives much the same answers to the key questions of interest, if you use it correctly, and choose input parameters consistent with those in the big model. The big model (if it’s a good one) imposes consistency conditions you might miss in a simple model, and also gives detailed answers to lots of more specific questions, but a lot of the time, you can do without that. I’m writing a paper at the moment, trying to answer some of the important in a way anyone can check without spending years mastering a big model.

The biggest question of the moment is: what is the right price for carbon? I’m going to look at this question for the world as a whole, disregarding national differences and so on. If you’ve read the title of the post, you’ll know what answer I reach.

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I’m going to use this post to put down a summary and some responses to the final Garnaut Review as I read it. Comments welcome, but may become obsolete as the text changes.

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Ten years or so ago, the Australian dollar was worth about 50 US cents on foreign exchange markets. I bet a small amount with a colleague that within five years, $A would have achieved parity. My reasoning was simple, elegant and wrong. By most estimates, the Purchasing Power Parity exchange rate[1] is around $A1.00 = $US0.70, so the Australian dollar was undervalued by around 40 per cent. It seemed to me that, within five years or so, the deviation should have not only been corrected but overshot in the other direction, giving a rate near parity.

I should have considered more carefully the saying, apocryphally attributed to Keynes, that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. If deviations from PPP corrected within five years, speculators would bet on this happening, and the deviation would not be sustained at all. So, if PPP is false, it must stay false for long periods.

And that’s what’s happened. The Australian dollar has been above parity for some months now, and shows no sign of falling.

That raises some interesting questions. I’ll put up a few over the fold, and maybe update them as I go

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The International Energy Agency reported today that global CO2 emissions hit a new record in 2010, and are well above where they should be for a path to stabilise CO2(+equivalent) concentrations at 450 ppm. The Global Financial Crisis has had a significant impact in the US and Europe but (not surprisingly) hardly any in China, where the impact of the crisis was short-lived, and rapidly offset by a strong fiscal stimulus. With the failure of policy in the US, things are not looking good. On the other hand, after playing the wrecker’s role at Copenhagen, China now seems to have embraced the idea of becoming the world leader in renewable energy.

The real good news is a new study undertaken by the IEA that refutes negative views about the variability of supply from PV and wind power (expressed by quite a few commenters here over the years, and the subject of numerous amateur analyses at blogs like Brave New Climate) and concludes that “the challenges of integrating large shares of variable renewables in power systems are far from insurmountable“. The analysis suggests that starting with existing grid characteristics, and employing balancing technologies now available, it would be possible to supply between 20 per cent (Japan) and 60 per cent (Denmark) of electricity generation using variable renewables, with an average of around 30 per cent. No specific date is given, but the discussion implies a time horizon around 2030.

Unfortunately, the PDF containing the detailed analysis is on sale at a price of 80 euros, which I don’t intend to pay, but the executive summary is online and gives a general idea of the argument.

An important point is that the most natural partners for variable renewables are sources that can be turned on and off easily. Hydro-electricity is the best example, but scope for expansion is limited. The next best case is a mixture of gas and variable renewables, and that seems like the sensible path to take over the next decade or two.

In the absence of any equally authoritative critique of the IEA analysis, I intend to treat this question as settled from now on, as with the prospects for nuclear power. Anyone seeking to make unsupported counter-claims based on their own intuition, BNC-style amateur analysis and so on should take them to the nuclear sandpit.

Summing up the news so far, if the world’s governments are willing to act to stabilise the global climate, they can do so at very low cost. It remains to be seen whether or not they will.

The announcement by the UK government (Conservative-LibDem coalition) that it would aim to reduce CO2 emissions by 50 per cent, relative to 1990 levels, by 2025 has had a significant impact on the Australian debate and is likely to have a greater impact as time goes on.

In part this reflects the fact that, understandably if not entirely justifiably, Australians pay a lot more attention to news and ideas from the UK and US than from, say, France or Germany. The British announcement cuts the ground from under many of the claims being made by the denial/delusion/delay lobby in Australia.

* The idea that “Australia risks getting out in front of the world” is obviously false. Even assuming we get a carbon tax, leading on to an emissions trading scheme later this decade, we will be a decade or so behind the UK and other EU countries, which introduced an ETS in 2005

* The view that it is impossible, in a modern economy to reduce emissions substantially without a radical reduction in economic activity is obviously not shared by the UK government which (unlike the critics) has actually done the analytical work required to show that large reductions can be achieved at very little economic cost, and is now implementing the required policy. I’ve demonstrated this point over and over on this blog, and the negative responses have amounted to little more than “La, la, I’m not listening”, but hopefully a practical demonstration will have more effect

* As part of the longstanding intellectual trade with the UK, we get a regular flow of delusionist speakers like Lord Monckton out here (fair’s fair, we did send them Clive and Germaine after all). Demolition jobs like this one, from a leading British Tory, might make their audiences a bit more sceptical

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Here’s a new sandpit for (non-nuclear) lengthy side discussion, rants on idees fixes and so on.

Fire away on anything related to nuclear energy.

It’s time again for the Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language. Lengthy side discussions to the sandpits, please.

That’s the advice on scandal management from former Clinton spinmaster Lanny Davis, who’s since applied his expertise to defending some of the least appealing clients imaginable. Whatever you think of Davis, his advice is pretty good, and lots of people have come to grief by doing the opposite. That certainly seems to be the case with George Mason University. In March 2010, they received an official complaint of plagiarism regarding the notorious Wegman report produced (at the request of Republican Congressman Joe Barton) to criticise the well-known ‘hockey stick’ graph of global temperatures. Amazingly, GMU Professor Edward Wegman had lifted substantial blocks of text, without acknowledgement, from one of his targets, Raymond Bradley. When this was pointed out by bloggers John Mashey and Deep Climate, Bradley complained and asked for the report to be retracted.

Ignoring (or ignorant of) Davis’ advice, GMU took its time, perhaps hoping the problem would go away. Unfortunately for them, the opposite happened. Further research produced at least two more instances of plagiarism, one in another section of the Wegman report dealing with social networks and another in an unrelated paper on color vision. As I a mentioned a little while ago, the social networks analysis produced an academic paper, accepted by a Wegman mate with no peer review, which has now been retracted.

And now, Nature, which published the original hockey stick paper in 1999, has weighed in with an editorial calling for GMU to hurry up, and making mention of the Office of Research Integrity as an alternative process. That could make it a criminal matter.

At this point, GMU has no appealing options.

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A few updates on my last post

* A link from Paul Krugman, who’s more pessimistic than I am

* A scathing piece from archetypal centrist Dana Milbank on default denialism, linking it to birtherism, climate conspiracy theories and moon landing hoax claims

* At Crikey Guy Rundle looks at the significance of the (non)-Rapture in relation to climate change and similar denials of reality

The fact that, with no observable exceptions, the US Republican Party relies on delusional beliefs for most of its claims about economics, science and history has been obvious for some years. But, until recently it’s been outside the Overton Window. That seems to have changed, as witness:

* Jacob Weisberg, who only a little while ago was giving qualified praise to the Ryan Plan, now says the Repubs have

moved to a mental Shangri-La, where unwanted problems (climate change, the need to pay the costs of running the government) can be wished away, prejudice trumps fact (Obama might just be Kenyan-born or a Muslim), expertise is evidence of error, and reality itself comes to be regarded as some kind of elitist plot.

* USA Today comparing Republican climate change delusionism to birtherism and saying

The latest scientific report provides clarity that denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. It paves a path to a future fraught with melting ice caps, rising sea levels, shifting agricultural patterns, droughts and wildfires.

* The Washington Post, home of High Broderism says “the Republican Party, and therefore the U.S. government, have moved far from reality and responsibility in their approach to climate change.”

* Even GOP house journal Politico draws the formerly off-limits link between “skeptics” and “deniers”, regarding the Republican adoption of fringe economic theories suggesting the US can safely leave the debt ceiling unchanged.

Why is this happening now, after years of apparent Republican immunity from any kind of fact-based challenge? And how will this affect public debate in the US and elsewhere?

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It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. In keeping with my attempts to open up the comments to new contributors , I’d like to redirect discussion, and restatements of previous arguments, as opposed to substantive new contributions, to the sandpit(s). As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

There are three people prominent in Australian politics whom I would happily support as Prime Minister[1]. Of these, the one who has the best chance is, I think, Malcolm Turnbull (it shouldn’t be hard for readers to guess the other two). He’s reminded us again what we lost when he was replaced by the lightweight opportunist who now leads the Opposition, against a mirror-image PM. If the Libs would put Turnbull up again, they would get my vote for the first time.

fn1. That reflects a fairly pessimistic view of what progress can be made. A competent government with a decent and consistent policy on climate change is as much as we can hope for at present.

Linking to Bennett McCallum with some puzzlement a while back, Brad DeLong asked why a higher inflation target could be seen as undermining central bank independence. I’m with McCallum on the analysis, but not on the policy conclusion. A higher inflation target would reduce central bank independence, and a good thing too.

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A few years back as part of the attack on climate science (and in particular the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph) Senator Joe Barton commission an assessment of the work of Michael Mann and others from Professor Edward Wegman of George Mason University, along with his former student Yasmin Said and some others. This included, not only Wegman’s supposedly independent assessment of the statistical methods used by Mann but a ‘social network analysis’ of the relationship between Mann and his co-authors, which purportedly showed that Mann’s network of co-authors dominated the climate science field. As I pointed out at the time, Wegman et al started the analysis with Mann at the centre, so the primary result was that Mann had written a paper with every one of his co-authors! Nevertheless, a version of the paper was published in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, in which Wegman took this analysis to the startling conclusion that senior academics should not collaborate with each other, but should instead work only with their students. Wegman follows his own advice in this respect, and now we can see why.

It’s just been announced that the paper is to be retracted on the grounds that it contains extensive plagiarism, much but not all of it from Wikipedia. Wegman’s response, showing the wisdom of his research strategy, is to blame his graduate student, who was not, however credited as an author. USA Today, which has taken the lead in following the Wegman plagiarism story, asked an actual expert to look at the paper and her reaction was about the same as my amateur assessment (Wegman and Said are also newcomers to the field, which may explain their heavy reliance on Wikipedia as a reference source).
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For students of agnotology there is no more striking finding than the observation that many people, presented with evidence that undermines a strongly held belief, react as if that belief had been confirmed[1]. This seems to undermine any possibility that evidence will ever settle political disputes. And yet, evidence does seem to seep through in the end. Although belief in Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction persisted long after the absence of evidence had turned into clear evidence of absence, it faded away in the end (not that it has completely disappeared even now).

As a slightly more optimistic take on the experimental evidence, I offer the example of Santa Claus. Young children, presented with the suggestion that Santa isn’t real, blithely ignore it. Slightly older children, though, react in exactly the manner of the experimental subjects, reaffirming their belief in the Santa story and (of course) the associated presents. Later, of course, they accept the truth.

In some social contexts children are likely draw the obvious analogy between Santa and God, while in other contexts, the distinction between the two beliefs is maintained successfully. But regardless of context, there is an obvious risk, for those who would like their children to grow up as theists, in insisting too hard on the reality of Santa.

Similarly, I suspect that the apparent success of Republicans in believing six impossible things before breakfast, and in taking up new delusions as old ones are abandoned, may mask an underlying erosion of faith. Birtherism may morph into torturism without any obvious sign of stress, but at some level people must gradually become aware that their political beliefs are more like the faith that belief in Santa will bring presents and less like the belief that kicking a rock will give you a stubbed toe.

fn1. The general phenonomen of confirmation bias (paying attention to evidence that supports your belief and disregarding contradictory evidence) is well established. The first finding of reinforcement Nyhan and Riefler find that Democrats ignore contradictory evidence, while Republicans respond in the way I described. I can’t find the study that supported this. Nyhan and Riefler cite earlier research by Redlawski that I haven’t been able to find.

It’s time again for the Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language. Lengthy side discussions to the sandpits, please.

There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy about the prospects of stabilising the global climate. The failure at Copenhagen (partly, but far from wholly, redressed in the subsequent meeting at Cancun) means that a binding international agreement, let alone an effective international trading scheme, is a long way off. The political right, at least in English-speaking countries, has deepened its commitment to anti-science delusionism. And (regardless of views on its merits) the prospect of a significant contribution from nuclear power has pretty much disappeared, at least for the next decade or so, following Fukushima and the failure of the US ‘nuclear renaissance’.

But there’s also some striking good news. Most important is the arrival of ‘peak gasoline’ in the US. US gasoline consumption peaked in 2006 and was about 8 per cent below the peak in 2010. Consumption per person has fallen more than 10 per cent.
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That’s the title of my piece in yesterday’s Fin, over the Fold

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