Remember the nuclear renaissance? Well, it’s over
Monday’s announcement that the construction of the Virgil C. Summer nuclear power plant in South Carolina is to be scaled back or halted marks as good a point as any to declare the end of the “nuclear...
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The generation game
“Every generation thinks it invented sex, and every generation is wrong.” As that quotation from the American writer Robert Heinlein suggests, we all experience as unique and revelatory the...
View ArticleThe Productivity Commission’s multi-factor problem
Much of the Productivity Commission’s latest five-yearly “productivity review,” Shifting the Dial, is a grab-bag of policy recommendations dating back as far as the 1990s. Some are good ideas that have...
View ArticleWhy 2017 was a good year for climate
On the face of it, there was plenty of bad news for the climate in 2017. Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement and promised to reverse the decline...
View ArticleBitcoin’s zero-sum game
As bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies increasingly become part of the mainstream financial system, traded on futures markets and supported by loans from commercial banks, a central question has moved...
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Vocational education policy is failing, and it’s not hard to see why
Amid the controversies swirling around the citizenship status and personal lives of our politicians, more important but less newsworthy developments pass unnoticed. And even they sometimes have an...
View ArticleWestward, look, the land is bright
Eighteen forty-nine was a bad year for democracy in Europe. In Britain, a People’s Charter demanding universal (male) suffrage, secret ballots and other democratic reforms had been ignored by an...
View ArticleWill a robot take your job?
Thinking about the implications of artificial intelligence, or AI, can be disorienting. On the one hand, we are surrounded by technological marvels: robot vacuum cleaners, watches that call the nearest...
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Another Adani alarm
Yesterday’s announcement that Adani Mining would proceed with the Carmichael mine project without external funding was not entirely surprising. Adani has persevered with the project despite years of...
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Adani’s Potemkin village
Throughout the long struggle over Adani’s Carmichael mine, I’ve argued that the project is not only environmentally disastrous but also financially unviable. Adani’s objective has been to keep the...
View ArticleOpportunity knocks, at a cost
Last week’s decision by the NSW Land and Environment Court to take account of coal-burning emissions in refusing approval for the Rocky Hill mine is obviously a big deal. How big depends on what...
View ArticleToo big to ignore
Two hundred years after the birth of Karl Marx and fifty years after the last Western upsurge of revolutionary ferment in 1968, the term “monopoly capitalism” might seem like a relic of outmoded...
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How Britain kicked coal
Despite the chaos of Brexit and the difficulty of expanding renewable generation in a country where sunshine is notoriously scarce, and despite strong opposition to wind turbines, Britain has just...
View ArticleHow much will it cost to deal with climate change?
Have you noticed $10,000 missing from your savings? Back in 1996, that was the predicted cost to the average family of a government commitment to hold emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The prediction...
View ArticleA matter of preferences
Preferences only began to play a central role in Australian elections after the emergence of the Democratic Labor Party in the 1950s. Before that, the preferential voting system had enabled the...
View ArticleA message from the recent past
Facebook’s announcement that it is launching a cryptocurrency called Libra raises two questions. Will Libra compete with the most famous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin? And what is a cryptocurrency anyway?...
View ArticleAdani’s silent partners
It’s a month since Adani received final approvals for its Carmichael mine, and it’s still hard to work out what’s going on at its site and in the Galilee Basin in general. On the jobs front, Adani has...
View ArticleWant to reduce the power of the finance sector? Start by looking at climate...
In the lead-up to a revolutionary change, the status quo often seems both unyielding and untenable. The Soviet bloc in the 1980s provides a dramatic example: neither the rulers nor the ruled had any...
View ArticleIs Adani still playing for time?
It’s now nearly four months since the Morrison government’s re-election and nearly three months since Adani received the critical approvals for its Carmichael mine–rail–port project. Adani has been...
View ArticleYes, the world is paying attention to Australia’s climate inaction
Like their counterparts in many other countries, members of Australia’s political class are frequently accused of living inside a self-regarding bubble. That’s certainly true when it comes to climate...
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