Australian carbon trading

The Australian carbon trading system is supposed to be unveiled tomorrow. I fear that it will be a symbolic system, designed to give the appearance of progress while protecting core labor constituencies like coal and manufacturing. But since I’m an optimist, I’ll discuss my hopes instead.

As a major coal, ore, and natural gas exporter, Australia actually sends a sizable chunk of the emissions from its economic activity offshore. Obviously, manufacturing groups are sensibly concerned that putting a cost on manufacturing emissions will simply drive even more heavy industry offshore. So there has been talk of exempting such industries from carbon costs, thus creating a giant loophole that protects industry at the expense of the planet.

But there is a better way. Instead of giving vulnerable industries a free pass to pollute, the trading system could instead impose a carbon cost on exported raw materials, equal to the carbon cost needed to refine those products. Overseas manufacturers could then get this fee refunded if they use less than the assumed quantity of carbon to process Australian raw materials.

Of course, this would make Australian exports less competitive. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Australian economy is currently overheating, due almost entirely to the increased revenues from coal and iron ore export. The fiscal measures that have been imposed to slow the economy have had the effect of penalizing struggling workers in non-resource parts of the economy. So an export tariff would slow the economy without bankrupting the outer suburbs.

Additionally, allowing foreigners to reclaim the cost with low carbon technologies would give developing countries which import Australian raw materials an incentive to buy into the Australian trading system. Since these countries are generally exempt from Kyoto limits, allowing them to use the Australian system would give them an incentive to reduce emissions which international agreement do not currently provide.

Why the rev-head gene is so dominant

I have a feeling that this joke has been done before by someone with far more artistic talent than I possess. If anyone finds a reference, feel free to post it in comments.

Mermaids in the outback

One of the great things about Australian English is the richness of unique and colorful expressions that are foreign to those of us who grew up speaking one of the Northern Hemisphere variants of the language. Some of these are common throughout Australia. indeed, there exist lists on the internet that will provide translations of various terms, albeit devoid of cultural context. And having lived here for 11 years, I’ve heard most of the slang that is in widespread usage. But there are some choice terms which, due to either the physical isolation of the outback or the cultural isolation of my former career in academia, I have not heard. This is one of my favorites:

Mermaid: A weigh bridge operator.

It may be that some of the readers of this blog are the sort of isolated, industry-deficient people who have no knowledge of logistics. As such, one or two of them may not have used a weigh bridge, or even know what they are. So for their elucidation, here is an explanation.
A weigh bridge is a set of very large scales, which are used to weigh freight trucks. This is done to determine compliance- or lack thereof- with any of the various rules in regulations that govern the trucking profession. In addition to checking weight, the weigh bridge also serves as an enforcement point for other rules, such as logbook inspection, etc.

Usage: The mermaids dinged me for being less than a quarter ton over on my rear axle.
Or
Sorry I’m two days late to site- I had to take the rig down the 4WD track to avoid the mermaids.

Most truckers seem to be drawn to the profession for reasons other than the bureaucratic quagmire that has been imposed on it by road safety. As a result, these rules and regulations are resented by many in the transport community, especially the small, independent operators who don’t have a head office to sort things out- or in some cases, the ability to read. This resentment towards the people who weigh their trucks explains where the term “mermaid” comes from.

Derivation: A cunt with scales.

Question for conservationists

Am I as environmetally virtuous as a person who takes daily three minute showers, if I take a single 21 minute shower once a week?

Gas background suppression during ICPMS analysis

This is a brief technical note for any ICPMS users out there who are trying to analyse elements with carrier gas interferences. Although I am not in the private sector, I still interact socially with academic researchers from time to time, and a post doc recently approached me with a analytical problem that may be related.
In laser ICPMS analysis, it is commonly assumed that any background that exists in the carrier gas prior to sample acquisition will remain constant when the laser comes on and ablation introduces sample into the system. However, as a result of this recent query I dug up some 2 year old data where I investigated this effect, and I noticed that for gas interferences with high first ionization potentials, sample introduction can reduce the background. Thus if you subtract the unreduced background from the sample signal, you will oversubtract, and underestimate your abundance.
The following table shows a) the mean background counts for one Xe and two Hg isotopes (which are both contaminants in the Ar gas); b) The mean counts during signal acquisition, and c) the ratio of signal/background.

Note that when ablating the doped Na-Ca-Al-Si NIST 612 glass, the Xe signal is reduced to 93% of the background, while the Hg is reduced to 98%. Interestingly, this effect seems to be matrix-specific; ablation of rutile only reduced the Xe to 98% while leaving Hg unchanged.
I have no idea if this sort of thing has been published- its easier to mine the data then slog through a library which I can’t access. And since I’m not an academic, I don’t particularly care. But chances are this sort of effect is machine specific, so anyone trying to measure isotopes such as 130Te, 82Se, or 204Pb would be wise to check their own instruments before trying to quantify unknowns.

Skeptic carnival

The 88th skeptic carnival us up at Jyunri Kankei's matters of reason. This is a belated post, as I was in the field when it came out. And I'm in the field again. But I’m sure the material only improves with age.

Corporate vultures plus 1, social justice dupes minus 100,000,000

There was an article in the Australian newspaper today about a recent settlement between a NY hedge fund and the Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the former Zaire). Elliot management, a $10 billion dollar hedge fund, acquired 0.1 billion dollars of overdue debt from the RoC, one of the most impoverished companies on Earth. The reason this deal was not complete lunacy was geological- the RoC is Africa’s 4th largest oil producer, and with today’s record prices, their production is worth almost 12 billion dollars a year- allowing the country to pump Elliot’s net worth every 10 months. The problem was figuring out where all this money went.
Their first step was to get court injunctions allowing them to have assets seized to pay off this debt. This move was strongly condemned by the millionaire poverty activists like Bob Geldorff and Bono as perpetuating the cycle of African poverty. Ignoring these taunts, they then proceeded to do, using private investigators and their own money, what law enforcement agencies have been unwilling or unable to do for decades- they started tracking down the byzantine pathways by which the African oil was delivered to markets, and the financial conduits through which the money flowed. Where evidence of corrupt or illegal activity surfaced, they pressed for racketeering charges. And in a final act, they acquired and then published the credit card receipts of the president’s son, showing that he ran up a quarter of a million dollars in designer shopping bills in Paris while he people were struggling on a few dollars a day.
The end result is that the RoC decided that paying back debt might not be so impossible after all, in exchange for the cessation of the investigation. While this action does not have any direct impact on the plight of the country, there are substantial indirect benefits. By actually paying its debts, the RoC becomes a marginally less dodgy credit risk for future loans. More importantly, it puts the people in charge on notice that using oil and aid revenues for personal enrichment is not a risk-free strategy. Debt forgiveness would have accomplished neither of these things.
So I’m chalking this one up as a victory for the forces of quantification and data collection over those of emotion and ideology. Vultures 1, Activists zero. And minus $100,000,000 for the dictators, their money launderers, and associated forces of evil.

Murcheson Meteorite

The Murcheson meteorite has been in the news again, as a result of a slick piece of organic geochemisty described by the Bad Astronomer. Indeed, from the Wikipedia entry you’d think that this is the meteorite’s only claim to fame. But there is far more to this rock than mere molecules.
Murcheson is the first member of the cosmochemical trifecta of 1969 (The others being Allende and the Apollo moon rocks). A primitive chondrite, it is one of the main sources of presolar grains- interstellar dust particles that predate the solar system.
Mind you, the meteorite itself is not pre-solar. The vast majority of it consists of material that condnesed from the solar nebula. But this particular meteorite has suffered no remelting since it formed, and as a result, tiny bits of pre-existing dust can be found in it.
The most well studied and characterized of these grains are silicon carbide. These grains are rare, and isolating them is a lot like finding a needle in a haystack. Indeed the methodology used to recover them is similar. Carbides are chemically resistant material, so they are isolated by simply dissolving the rest of the meteorite in acids and other solvents. This is the metaphorical equivalent of burning down the haystack and pulling the needle from the ashes with a magnet.
These silicon carbide grains have been useful for all sorts of purposes, such as experimental confirmation of stellar nucleosynthesis, chiefly the S process.
But these carbides also present a significant sampling bias. Then can only form in carbon stars- start which have more carbon than oxygen in their atmospheres. If there is more oxygen than carbon, then the carbon will be consumed in the production of carbon monoxide, and the leftover oxygen will form metal oxides instead of carbides. So oxygen stars like the sun cannot form carbides unless the C/O ratio changes as a result of helium burning in the star’s dying days.
Oxygen stars should be able to form refactory oxides which are tough enough to survive the collapse of the solar nebula. And indeed a few presolar corundums are known. But because rocks are made chiefly of metal oxides, finding presolar oxides is more like finding a pine needle in a haystack. Instead of a match, you need a gaggle of patient grad students. However, such people do exist, and are currently trying to invent efficient methods of finding anomalous grains. Hopefully they will find and characterize extrasolar silicates before too long.
I don’t think we’ve heard the last from this rock.