How a carbon tax should work

I have been fairly critical of the current Australian Government’s approach to a range of issues, in particular, global warming. The current proposal is for a carbon tax. While my preference for dealing with carbon emissions is to let the damages get worked out in the courts, a carbon tax can work OK, if done well. I don’t have confidence that the current government can do anything well, but it is rude to criticize unconstructively, so the least I can do is propose a sensible carbon tax which the government and the special interests who run it can ignore. So here we go:

The goal of a carbon tax is to reduce climate change, preferably to the point where the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps don’t melt and flood Australia’s world-class beaches.

A carbon tax therefore needs to reduce carbon emissions. Australia is a large per-capita emitter, and is also a large carbon exporter, in the form of coal, and to a lesser extent, natural gas. So the basic idea of the carbon tax is to guide the transition from carbon-based energy infrastructure to lower carbon forms. In order to do this, it has to be broad-based, scaled to the potential threat, and predictable over a several decade timescale.

Luckily, there is an easy way to do this. The climate scientists tell us that atmospheric CO2 concentrations greater than 350 ppm are likely to cause troublesome warming, with higher concentrations bringing more trouble faster. We are currently at 388 ppm. So, CO2 emissions are not a problem if there isn’t much CO2 in the atmosphere, but become more problematic, the farther over the safe limit we are. Thus, the sensible thing to do is to scale the carbon tax based on the atmospheric concentration.

The easiest and most transparent way to do this is to simply tax CO2 emissions at one dollar per ton, for each ppm in the atmosphere over 350. So at the current level of 388 ppm, the rate would be 388-350= 38 dollars per ton (I’m assuming we all work in tons of carbon, but if the standard value is tons CO2, please correct me). At the current rates of rise, this rate will go up by a little under 2 dollars per year.

The tax rate will stop rising when CO2 emissions stabilize, as it should. If sequestration ever takes hold in a serious way, the rate could even come down. And if carbon producers manage to sequester our atmosphere back down below 350 ppm, then the tax rate would drop to zero, which would be entirely fair.

Economic modelers can project future CO2 rise rates, which gives them more confidence and planning abilities than they have right now, and this scheme would be far preferable to an unknown tax rate that will last for an unspecified period of time and be subject to God-knows what kind of increases, changes and repeals.

The only remaining challenge would be figuring out how to apply it to the world’s other six continents, and their respective economies.

What the money gets spent on is another issue, but damages and consumer compensation are easy places to start.

3QD semifinalists announced

Three quarks daily has announced the semifinalists for its 2011 3QD science blogging prize. The Earth and planetary science blogs generally fared well. Of the entries I listed last week, the following have advanced:

Geology word of the week: O is for Ophiolite, by Evelyn Mervine at Georneys.

Ocean acidify-WHAT!? By Sheril Kirshenbaum at Convergence (originally posted at the Intersection).

The Pelican's Beak, by Brian Switek at Laelaps.

Prehistoric Clues Provide Insight into Climate’s Future Impact on Oceans, by Allie at Oh for the love of science.

Rare Earth elements aren’t rare, just playing hard to get, by Sarah Zielinski at Surprising Science.

Levees and the illusion of flood control, by Anne Jefferson at Highly Allochthonous.

While five other nominations (including mine) failed to advance.

Overall, this is a 55% success rate for Earth science, significantly better than the 23% overall, or the 18% for non-geoscience. Way to go, geoblogospheroids! The 3 quark daily editorial team now whittles the 20 remaining entries down to six for the final judge. Good luck folks.

Conference swag question

Here is a question for any lemming loungers who may have attended a scientific conference at one time or another during their careers (scientific or otherwise). What is the best “swag” or free commercial promotional giveaway, that you have received? Has the digital revolution changed this? For example, is there any point giving out pens and notebooks at a conference in 2011, or is everyone using usb sticks or handheld devices? Or are old-fashioned pens and paper notebooks vital for the later afternoon sessions where everyone’s device batteries have faded away?

On a broader note, do y’all spend much time looking at commercial booths at all? Or is the lure of the oral sessions too compelling for such time wasters? How do you divide up conference time anyway?

Back when I was a student, I would spend most of my time in talks or informally chatting with people in my field from far off lands whom I had never met in person. Evenings would be drinking beers with old friends. These days, I spend most of my time in a booth, or talking to potential customers.

In the 15 years since I first went to a scientific conference, I don't think I have ever been to a plenary session.

Government by TV stunt

In an abhorrent display of incompetence and cruelty, the Australian Government has, without warning or study, suspended cattle exports to Indonesia.

Dry season cattle country, Northern Territory, Australia. Yes, there are cows in this picture. Squint, or click to enlarge.

The Northern Cattle industry works like this: In the Australian summer months, the summer monsoon brings plentiful rains to the northern third of Australia. This provides ideal conditions for cattle, which grow fat and multiply during the times of plenty. It is a good thing that these conditions suit them, because the rains also make travel very difficult.

Sometime around March or so, the rains taper off, and April through October is the dry season. During this time, little or no rain falls, and the vegetation goes dormant. The road also dry out, and cattlemen thin their herds by exporting animals from Darwin to various buyers in Southern Asia. As the creeks and playas dry out, the cattle become dependent on pumped groundwater, and eat the remaining dried standing grass and shrubbery from the wet season. The southern limit of cattle production in Australia is actually set by groundwater salinity- if the groundwater is too salty for cattle, then they can’t be maintained over the dry season and the area can’t be grazed. So the cattle which are trucked to Darwin for export are sent off their stations chiefly because the land is not able to sustain them through the dry season.

What happened this week is that, without any planning or deliberation, the government had decided to suspend exports to Indonesia, as a short-sighted response to a reality TV stunt which filmed the brutal conditions of some Indonesian abattoirs. This move is in itself a cruel thing to do, as it jeopardizes the careers of thousands of people in both Indonesia and Australia without any cost to the moralizing oppressors who demand this action. But to do it in the middle of the dry season without any thought to what do to with the cattle is wasteful.

A planned phase-out of this industry should start in the wet season when transportation is low, and pastoral capacity is high, and would allow for construction in Australia of meat processing facilities and/or the procurement of other export markets. As it is, we have tens of thousands of Brahmin cattle in or en route to Darwin, with a ban on transporting them, no facilities for processing them, insufficient holding facilities for keeping them alive, and no forward plan for letting the pastoralists destock through the dry season. How does this leave any person or cow better off?

Quality Earth Science blogging

Three quarks daily has announced its nominations for the 2011 3QD science blogging prize. Several Earth and planetary science blogs are represented. While I would certainly appreciate some support, my only request is that anyone wishing to vote read at least two of the nominated posts before voting. If you have already read two, then find at least one you haven’t seen, even if you have to stoop to browsing through the entries from other forms of science. There’s some good writing out there.

In geochronological order, the Earth and planetary science nominations are:

Reflections on the Gulf Oil Spill - Conversations With My Grandpa, by Christie Wilcox at Observations of a Nerd gives an oil-cleanup insider’s view on the 2010 Gulf oil spill.

Ocean acidify-WHAT!? By Sheril Kirshenbaum at Convergence (originally posted at the Intersection) explains how increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations make the ocean more acidic.

The Pelican's Beak, by Brian Switek at Laelaps, describes the evolution of pelicans, crocodiles, and other slowly changing species.

Rare Earth elements aren’t rare, just playing hard to get, by Sarah Zielinski at Surprising Science explains the basic economic geology of the rare Earth elements.

Prehistoric Clues Provide Insight into Climate’s Future Impact on Oceans, by Allie at Oh for the love of science describes the oceanic apex predators of the Miocene.

Geology word of the week: O is for Ophiolite, by Evelyn Mervine at Georneys describes what ophiolites are.

A plethora of Planets by Mr. Temple at Is this your Homework? describes the Kepler exoplanetary mission and some of the early results.

Super Moon, by Steven Schimmrich, the Hudson Valley Geologist, talks about the Moon’s orbital characteristics.

Finding my tears; when 1 is worse than 10,000 by Brian Ziemund-Fisher at the Risk Science Blog explains a personal tragedy related to the Japanese tsunami.

Dear Hypothesis by me at Lounge of the Lab Lemming is a breakup letter to a hypothesis that didn’t fit the data.


Levees and the illusion of flood control, by Anne Jefferson at Highly Allochthonous describes how levees simultaneously protect towns and increase flood heights in the Mississippi river.

Although those individual blog posts are the official entries, several commenters on the voting page have mentioned the excellent coverage by Georneys of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster as a highlight as well.

*Update: Laelaps nomination added (sorry Brian).

Born again zircons

Last summer, I spent a bit of time back at Geoscience Australia as a geochronologist for hire, helping out with some of their state and territory geochronology programs. The report from the study I SHRIMPed zircons for is now out, thanks to the awesomeness of the first author, Dr. Nat Koscitin.

In theory, zircons are forever. The oldest known Earth materials are zircons, and there are countless* papers describing how they accumulate overgrowths through numerous heating and melting events.

So I was intrigues when I saw the following embayments on one of the samples. It is obvious that the zircon structure has been altered somehow. Prior to analysis, I assumed that it would be metamict- zircon where the accumulated radiation damage has destroyed the mineral structure.

Embayed zircons (c) Geoscience Australia

Usually, metamictization allows the radiogenic lead to escape, leading to geologically meaningless uranium-lead ratios. So I was surprised when these inliers gave a beautiful age that was 25 million years (plus or minus five) younger than the igneous crystallization age.

Igneous ages (red) are distinctly older than embayment ages (blue), which are surprisingly (to me) tightly clustered (c) Geoscience Australia.

The inliers have very low, “metamorphic type” Th/U ratios, suggesting that the zircon was drastically recrystallized, if not completely destroyed and regrown. These zircons weren’t forever; they had their insides dissolved and reprecipitated when they were 25 million years old. I had a brief look through the literature, but didn’t find anything that looked particularly similar. So I flicked the interpretation back to the petrologists and/or fieldies in the text. They didn’t come to the rescue- at least not yet.

If anyone knows how these things form, what they mean, and where I can read about previous descriptions, I’d appreciate it. I hear that the Curtin University gang has seen something similar, but I don’t have a particular reference. Any tips out there?


* Well, hundreds at least

The modern middle passage

There are two big foreign affairs stories here in Australia this week. The first is that Australia is banning the export of cattle to certain Indonesian slaughterhouses because the conditions are inhumane.

The second is that Australia will transport immigrant children caught sailing towards Australia to Malaysia. There's a word for transporting people across oceans against their will to countries which refuse to recognize their human rights. And it isn't "humane". Let's just hope they don't use the idle cattle boats to do it.

p.s. It's a good thing Jessica Watson isn't still at sea.

Geochemical googling

Razib over at Gene Expression has recently pointed out a new Google tool, which allows one to look for correlated searches and the geographic breakdown of those searches. Surprisingly, he failed to apply it to geochemistry. So I shall.

Here is the distribution for “Geochronology”

The three top correlated words or phrases were:
0.9361 porphyry
0.9315 f 650 gs
0.9309 bmw f 650

Which suggests that the f-series beamer bikes have been around for a geologically significant time period. I suspect the correlation refers to percentage of total searches from each state. I am not particularly surprised that the rocky mountain west is more geochemical than the rest of the country.

Not surprisingly, Zircon has a fairly similar distribution.

The matched terms are also bizarre:
0.8794 high density foam
0.8757 garmin geko
0.8719 snowboard gear

Archean is interesting:

The main distribution maps fairly well with the Archean Wyoming craton, one of the two Archean cratons in the US. I don’t know why the residents of the Superior craton are so disinterested in their geology.

It matches up with:
0.8993 motocross tires
0.8921 were wolves
0.8907 proterozoic

And finally, for a bit of soft-rock affirmative action, I looked at the distribution for global warming.

This was much more widespread, and interestingly, was somewhat inversely correlated with the temperature anomaly for the last 90 days (from NOAA):