International Law

The Oikos archives

Posted on June 12, 2011
Welcome to the archives of the Oikos blog.Oikos is a blog I authored from 2005 to 2009, focussing on environmental economics and environmental policy in Australia.If you'd like to contact me, please email me at ozelaw[at]yahoo[dot]com[dot]au. I check the account sporadically...

Some quick thoughts on the Oz emissions trading scheme

Posted on November 25, 2009
We have a good idea now of what the so-called Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is going to look like, after the Government and Opposition hammered out a deal on Tuesday and it was endorsed (barely) by the Liberal Party in a turbulent day yesterday. It seems that the Government now has the numbers to get the Bill through the Senate, with enough opposition senators willing to support it...

Ken Henry on tax reform

Posted on October 19, 2009
If the tax structure from early last century prevailed today, we would have to raise $40 billion from excise and $230 billion from tariffs to meet today's revenue demand. At that rate the excise on a schooner of beer would be around 7 times what it is today...

Climate Change Blog Action Day

Posted on October 15, 2009
Apparently today is Blog Action Day for Climate Change and I thought I'd throw it open to my wonderful blog readers.I find myself alternatively optimistic and despairing on climate change. How bad is it going to be? Are we going to do what it takes to avoid the worst? And what do you think is going to be the most help? People and communities and businesses taking action themselves? National governments agreeing on strong action at Copenhagen and setting up strong domestic laws, like emissions trading? Peak oil or economic crisis reducing emissions automatically? Or technological breakthroughs making it easier than we thought? Or will it take some real environmental crisis to get the impetus?What do you think? Put in your two cents for Blog Action Day - bloggers, regulars, visitors and lurkers!CheersDave

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What's the Opposition's climate policy?

Posted on October 07, 2009
I saw Maclolm Turnbull interviewed the other night saying that he supported emissions trading and reminding people that emissions trading was indeed government policy under the previous Howard Liberal government when Turnbull was Environment Minister (it was pretty token and very very late if I remember rightly)...

Emissions trading: Auctioning permits vs giving them away

Posted on October 06, 2009
As I've talked about before (The great permit give-away), one of the big debates in emissions trading is whether to auction most of the permits or give them away free to industry. Under the Australian CPRS it looks like more and more will be given away, to industries that are particularly affected and/or have to compete with overseas industries that do not face carbon costs...

Red sky in the morning...

Posted on September 22, 2009
Strange weather in Australia recently: record high winter temperatures, bushfires in spring, hail the size of cricket balls overnight and we woke this morning to an apocalyptic orange glow in Sydney.Meanwhile our Prime Minister is at the UN for climate change talks and the domestic question is whether we should have our emissions trading scheme ready to go for Copenhagen or wait for the outcome of the Copenhagen talks and a post-Kyoto international agreement...

Stimulus payments can kill you

Posted on September 09, 2009
Yes, those $900 cheques from Uncle Kevin can kill. That?s the finding of a new study in the Bulletin on Aging and Health:Many studies find that households increase their consumption after the receipt of expected income payments, a result inconsistent with the life-cycle/permanent income hypothesis...

Economics and supermarket checkout lines

Posted on September 09, 2009
I remember reading a nice exposition of the efficient markets hypothesis on Andrew Leigh's blog a while back:So if we believe shoppers are as rational as traders (why not?), then there should be a parallel efficient supermarkets hypothesis. The efficient supermarkets hypothesis tells us that: (a) the length of the line reflects all available information about its speed (cashier skill, size of preceding trolleys etc), (b) the best way of getting through the supermarket checkout is to pick the closest line and stay in it, and (c) the worst thing you can do at the supermarket is switch lines...

Dealing with uncertainties in carbon price

Posted on September 09, 2009
The main difference between a carbon tax (emissions tax) and an emissions trading scheme is this. With a carbon tax, the price of emitting a unit of greenhouse gases is fixed but the total level of emissions is unknown. With an emissions trading scheme, the level of emissions is fixed (capped) but the price is unknown...

Clean Coal on Four Corners

Posted on September 06, 2009
Four Corners tonight is on progress with "clean coal" (also known as carbon capture and storage, CCS): coal-fired power stations that capture the greenhouse gases emitted from burning the coal and store them underground.The bottom line: coal is a large and growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and clean coal technology is a long way from being a commercial reality...

Nitpick of the day

Posted on September 04, 2009
OK, I'm being a bit trivial but indulge me. Sweeping generalisations and grand rhetorical statements bug me at the best of times, but particularly when they're quite obviously wrong.Ziggy Switkowski who, as former CEO of Australia's first and biggest telecommunications company, should know better, opens an otherwise interesting Online Opinion piece about the march of technology with this:Our forebears 100 years ago could not have dreamt of the emergence of television, computers, satellites...

The great give-away: Allocating permits under an emissions trading scheme

Posted on September 02, 2009
One of the bigger areas of debate in emissions trading is how to allocate permits. The purists (eg, Garnaut) suggest they should all be auctioned while political realities suggest a large chunk will be given away to compensate the industries that will suffer most under the scheme (Garnaut suggested that you should give cash compensation so it's transparent)...

Tax cigarettes, aclohol and junk food til no-one buys them?

Posted on September 01, 2009
The National Preventative Health Taskforce has just publicly released its strategy "Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020".For probably the first time ever, life expectancy in Australia is getting shorter. Three of the biggest and most preventable killers are tobacco, alcohol and obesity...

Carbon offsets: Oils ain't oils

Posted on September 01, 2009
If you wanted to offset the carbon emissions of a flight, you can buy carbon offsets from any number of providers. But the price for offsets done in different ways or certified under different standards can vary greatly. Why? A new paper investigates...

Renewable energy target expected to pass today

Posted on August 19, 2009
Some good news following last week's defeat in the Senate of the Australian emissions trading scheme. The Senate is voting today on the big increase in the mandatory renewable energy target (MRET), and it's expected to pass after the government and opposition reportedly reached a compromise yesterday...

Sustainable House Day - 13 September

Posted on August 17, 2009
13 September is Sustainable House Day. Greenies around Australia open their homes and share their stories and tips for making your home greener. Learn and be inspired.HT: Greenfoot

Game theory and Kyoto negotiations

Posted on August 13, 2009
I'm not a huge fan of simple game theory analyses of international climate change negotiations (even though I've been guilty of using them myself) because they tend to model each country as being an individual acting in its own interests, when the political reality is rather more complicated...

Wind power: plus ca change

Posted on August 12, 2009
Some common sense observations about wind power's potential in the UK from The Times: it deserves attention as fossil fuels diminish, it has low capital costs, it's plentiful, it's intermittent and there are challenges with power storage, but this is only a problem if it's intended as baseload supply...

Making cycling safer: The Idaho Stop Law

Posted on August 11, 2009
One area where I think public policy could really help sustainability in Australian cities is by making cycling an easier transport choice. Sydney strikes me as crying out for measures to encourage cycling. Cycling could really be a big part of the trasport mix here - yes some of the city is hilly but you've got probably 3 million people living within very easy cycling distance of the CBD...

The oppostion's rival carbon plan: greener, cheaper, smarter?

Posted on August 10, 2009
Malcolm Turnbull yesterday released an alternative carbon plan: "greener, cheaper, smarter". Sounds great. And finally some opposition policy on climate change. Well, not quite. The plan is a report by economic consultants 'Frontier Economics' commissioned by the oppostion and independent Senator Nic Xenophon...

Idle thoughts

Posted on August 07, 2009
An article in the August issue of Energy Policy suggests that people idling their cars (leaving the motor running when stopped) accounts for a surprising and mostly unnecessary 1.6% of US greenhouse gas emissions.Drivers who were surveyed on average thought that a car could be idle for almost 4 minutes before it was better to turn the engine off (in fact, it's more like 10 seconds)...

What I've been up to...

Posted on August 05, 2009
Hi all,Well Oikos is back. Welcome readers old and new!Oikos is a blog I started in November 2005, while enrolled in a Masters in environmental economics and not long after moving from an environment NGO to a government environmental agency.The blog's focus is at the intersection of the environment and economics...

Oikos returning soon...

Posted on July 22, 2009
Stay tuned!

Congestion tolls in Sydney

Posted on November 11, 2008
One interesting announcement in yesterday's NSW state mini-budget was the introduction of "congestion tolls" on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Tunnel: the toll will vary depending on the time of day. Tolls will increase from $3 to $4 during peak travel times, stay the same during a shoulder period and drop to $2...

Conflicts of interest in environmental planning

Posted on October 22, 2008
Andrew Norton has an interesting article on some unintended consequences of proposed reforms to Victoria's local government legislation. Reforms desgined to reduce the potential for conflicts of interest could undermine, rather than strengthen, the rights of residents to partcipate in the planning process:In the future, local councillors may be prevented from voting on the very motions before council they may have been elected to support or oppose...

Defensive investments

Posted on October 20, 2008
I'm back from a very enjoyable trip to Ireland and Scotland - and two fantstic weddings. Being on holidays, I was only generally aware that there was a financial meltdown going on and that everything was costing more each day as the Aussie dollar sunk about 30% against the Euro and pound over the course of the trip!I developed a bit of a taste for whisky in Ireland and (especially) Scotland, which is timely as it appears that fine whisky is one asset that has been appreciating in these tough times:Roughly 11 months after the launch of a Dutch online trade platform for exclusive single malt whiskies, mostly from Scotland, the World Whisky Index has seen an average return of 26...

Blogging break

Posted on September 04, 2008
There's been a lot going on in my life lately (in a good way) and unfortunately Oikos has been the victim of that. Ironically I've been spending more time on climate change issues than ever before but my energy in that sphere has been channeled into my environmental economics thesis which has kept me busy indeed...

Why do we pay people to waste our most precious resource?

Posted on July 17, 2008
It's one year today since the contract to build Sydney's desalination plant was signed and ANU environmental economists Quentin Grafton and Michael Ward have run the numbers on whether it was a good deal.  Their conclusion: the net benefit to Sydney households of the plant is negative one billion dollars...

Thoughts on the green paper - Part 1: petrol

Posted on July 16, 2008
The government?s green paper on emissions trading is now available. The government?s new phrase for its emissions trading scheme is ?carbon pollution reduction scheme?.The first thing that?s captured everyone?s attention ? not surprisingly ? is petrol...

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