DUTTON’S CLIMATE CRISIS
Peter Dutton is facing widespread condemnation of his plan to dump Australia’s 43% emissions reduction target by 2030 if elected. Guardian Australia reports that some of the criticism is coming from an unlikely source — the fossil fuel industry. The Australian Energy Council and the Business Council of Australia have both thrown their support behind retaining the current target, saying that it provides certainty to the industry during a time of transition. Interim chief executive of the Energy Council Ben Barnes says that while the target will be difficult to achieve, “that is not a reason to stop trying”. Liberal MP Bridget Archer has also come out in support of the target and has said that details of any alternative target should be revealed before an election, in contravention of Dutton’s stance, according to the ABC. Archer, who crossed the floor to support both the 2030 target and net zero by 2050, told the national broadcaster “The current targets are already legislated. They are the targets,” saying that any backtracking would be a “regressive” step.
Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Li Qiang will travel to Australia this Saturday and stay for four days in the latest attempt at rehabilitating ties between the nations that became strained during the COVID-19 outbreak, AAP reports. In the first visit from a Chinese premier in seven years, Li will visit all the big cities on a whirlwind tour of Perth, Adelaide and Canberra, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying he hopes remaining trade tariffs can be lifted. Also on the docket is a trip to Adelaide Zoo to visit the only giant panda in the southern hemisphere. The zoo is hoping to extend the loan of the panda from China, The Age reports, which is due to expire at the end of this year. Truly diplomacy at its most urgent.
HUNTER CONVICTED
Hunter Biden, the son of US President Joe Biden, has been convicted of three felony gun charges, The Australian reports. A jury in Delaware found that the younger Biden lied on an application for a firearm about using or having used drugs, meaning he illegally possessed the gun for 11 days. Dad-you-wish-you-had Joe has said that while he wouldn’t pardon his son if convicted, he was proud of him, saying “So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.” The conviction is “the needle that pops former president and convicted felon Donald Trump’s inflated and ludicrous claims of a rigged American justice system”, according to USA Today, which points out that it will be much harder for Trump to allege a biased or corrupt judiciary now it has convicted the son of a standing Democrat president.
Meanwhile, rental prices have risen by more than six times the rate of wages in the March quarter, reports the SMH. Across the major cities, the average rental price for a house rose 5%, while wages grew only 0.8% over the same period. Grattan Institute economist Joey Moloney says that without immediate rental assistance, homelessness will rise: “Globally, we don’t have high rates of homelessness, but if rents remain high, there is no doubt we will see more homelessness.” It comes as Peter Dutton’s plan to return migration to year 2000 levels would only bring down house and rental prices 4-6% over 10 years, a Grattan study reported in the AFR has shown. It would also stop 135,000 additional skilled workers from entering the country, at a loss of $34 billion to the economy over their lifetime.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Anomic aphasia is the term given to the inability to remember names, despite retaining good knowledge of the people or things to which they belong. It’s said that an elephant never forgets, but until now we didn’t know that this includes its name and the names of other elephants in its parade. A new study published in the Nature, Ecology and Evolution journal has found that elephants can communicate — vocally — directly to individuals, a trait extremely rare in the animal kingdom, SBS reports.
“Elephants do these really interesting behaviours where sometimes when they’re in a big group of females or a mate check of a group will give a call,” says Dr George Wittemyer, a co-author on the report. “The entire group will respond, they’ll group up around her or they’ll follow her. Then other times she gives seemingly a very similar call and nobody will respond, nobody will react, except for a single elephant and that elephant will respond or come up to her.”
Researchers are using artificial intelligence to create a “vocal label” for each elephant, given that much of the frequency of each name is below the level a human can hear. Elephants were found to respond eagerly to their name, especially adults, suggesting that they could perhaps take many years to develop and learn.
I for one welcome our new elephant overlords — I’d like to remind them that as a member of the media, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil fruitfully in their calcium-rich peanut farms.
SAY WHAT?
Switching from forehand to backhand should be easy. Also, remember it all starts with the footwork and the take-back is as important as the follow-through. No, this is not a metaphor. It’s just good technique.
Roger Federer
The retired Swiss tennis star had some specific advice for graduates of Dartmouth University, mainly about the benefits of an eastern grip.
CRIKEY RECAP
“The problem for Dutton is that even if you believe in his nuclear-fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden, under the Paris Agreement you can’t just leave cutting emissions until the last minute. Every five years, countries have to submit more ambitious nationally determined contributions. The next one is due next year and Australia’s existing NDC is a 43% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030. Abandoning that in favour of ‘We’ll do 90% in 2045-50 won’t wash. Nor will ‘We won’t make our existing NDC so we’re dropping it’.
Dutton’s journey on nuclear power has consisted of a series of stumbles and trips accompanied by a dogged insistence that nope, everything is fine. First it was to be all about small modular reactors, with conventional nuclear reactors dismissed as Soviet-era relics. That fiction couldn’t be maintained after the solitary SMR being built in a Western country was abandoned as it was far too costly for consumers.”
“Public transport users in Queensland will still benefit from lower costs during the trial, however, particularly those on lower incomes. But housing is often more expensive near transport hubs and many of the neediest commuters are farthest away from connections. Many renters in inner suburbs will deservedly benefit, but the gains will be unevenly distributed.
Thus, expansion of the network should be a higher priority. But one mustn’t overstate how much cheap fares undermine this goal. Fares usually only pay for part of a public transport network. In NSW, for instance, they cover approximately one-quarter of public transport costs — the rest is covered by governments.
Thus, governments cannot credibly use cheapening fares as an excuse to go slower on network expansion. And advocates for network expansion need not be so concerned by the revenue impact of low-fare trials as to renounce them entirely — their fight must always, invariably, be with governments who don’t spend enough from general revenue. Free trials might have middling outcomes in low-coverage systems, but they aren’t the real threat — austerity is.”
“Unlike traditional computing, which is very good at maths, generative AI works using pattern recognition. This technology decides answers based on the relationships it infers between data it analyses rather than any internal sense of our number system. When it comes to even basic arithmetic, generative AI struggles. (A recent Wall Street Journal review of a ChatGPT maths tutor bot for children found that it miscalculated 343 minus 17). Carrying out more sophisticated mathematics would be even more fraught, and that’s before you even consider questions about value judgements made by modelling, like what kind of data to use and how to extrapolate it.
Generative AI bots like [Alice] Ing are better suited to providing conversational answers based on existing resources like a company’s HR policies. They’ve proven to be helpful in situations like answering or summarising answers to a question using information from a large trove of data.”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Will Hunter Biden go to jail? Here’s what his sentence could look like (The New York Times) ($)
Ukraine ‘hits missile launch sites in Russia’ (BBC)
UK prime minister unveils Conservative Party manifesto ahead of general election (euronews)
At least 49 dead, 140 missing in migrant boat sinking off Yemen: UN (Al Jazeera)
Anger among French conservatives as party chief wants election deal with far right (Reuters)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The Coalition wants to dump our 2030 emissions target, yet somehow hit 2050’s. Behavioural economics has a name for that — Peter Martin (ABC): “If I offered you a choice of finishing an unpleasant task this month in return for $100, or finishing it a year later for 5% less, you are pretty likely to opt for finishing it a year later in return for 5% less. Economists would say that meant your ‘discount rate’ (the rate at which you discount what happens in the future) was greater than 5% per year.
It’s an incredibly useful concept, and one of the reasons we want to be paid interest when we lend money or deposit money in a fixed-term account. Yes, it will be nice to get our money back — but getting it back when the loan ends won’t feel as good as having it now. If our discount rate is 5% per year, getting the full amount back then will be worth 5% less to us per year, so we will want interest of 5% per year.
They can work, drive and graduate. But teenagers want something more — Daniel Cash (The SMH): “Last week in Canada, speaking in support of Bill S-201 (which, you guessed it, proposes lowering the voting age to 16), Senator Bernadette Clement ‘translated’ a portion of her speech into Gen Z language, saying: ‘Honourable fam, waiting to vote until 18 is a big yikes and mad cheugy. But S-201 hits different.’
Though Clement may have failed to leap the language barrier, the point stands. Should we be lowering the voting age to 16? By virtue of social media and its capacity to spread information, young people today have more exposure to politics and global issues than any generation before. And despite a significant portion of Australian adolescents not yet being of age to vote, it’s clear that we are pushing for influence in other ways: School Strikes 4 Climate, children at the March4Justice, schoolkids ditching class to protest against the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
