Climate action can look pretty simple:
* don’t burn stuff to generate heat and/or electricity
* grow more plants, especially trees, bushes, native grasses, seagrass, kelp…
* leave existing forests, grasslands, wetlands, kelp beds alone...
* generate electricity from wind, solar (wave, geothermal);
* backup with batteries (inc hydro)
* electrify everything (and source that electricity from those renewable generators listed above);
* reduce our reliance on red meat;
* feed livestock foods that limit methane
* buy food close to the source of production (to cut down on transportation);
* buy seasonal foods (to cut down on storage and preservatives);
* buy a diversity of foods (to encourage genetic and crop diversity).
Believe it or not, that gets us 95% of the way there.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
"Hours before cancelling a $90 billion contract for French submarines, Australia was still telling the company to proceed with design – but the plan to renege had been in the works since 2019.”
- there are ways to treat your allies, and then there’s what happened here.
"On the morning of September 15, Paris time, the French government-owned Naval Group received a letter from Australia’s Defence Department…
...it said Australia had accepted new documents sent by Naval Group, including technical specifications.”
Something that has been bothering me throughout the course of this pandemic, which has crystallised for me over the last 48 hours: the models we're using for our public health advice are simplistic.
Let me explain...
I'll start by noting that my first degree was a B.Sc majoring in physical applied mathematics and applied statistics. Essentially, to model the real world using equations of the deterministic and stochastic fashion.
(If you ever thought I came across as a bit of a nerd, now you know why)
GDP figures for the June Quarter are out. Let’s take a quick look…
* 0.7% increase to the economy across the quarter (slightly higher than expected);
* GDP rose 1.4% over the year
* Household savings ratio is down from 11.6% to 9.7%
After a significant fall in economic activity last year we saw a few quarters of growth, which have gradually decreased as government stimulus was withdrawn from the economy.
The June quarter also shows the impact on the Victorian economy of their lockdown in May/June...
GDP per hour worked declined 1.2% in the quarter, with an overall decline of 0.7% for the past year.
The drop in household savings is being driven mostly by a drop in disposable income due to less hours worked; and a modest increase in spending.
@SatPaper Before diving into the article, it’s worth noting a few facts:
* Australia has a population of 25.4m
* GDP is ranked 13th in the world at USD1.3tn (2017)
* GDP per capita we’re ranked 12th ($53,831 pp)
* Burundi earns $293 pp
In other words, we’re a very rich country.
It’s also worth pointing out that Australia was very well positioned - with a rebounding economy and relatively few cases - to line up vaccines early, and get Australia vaccinated.
I wanted to take a moment to look at why the various government rorts are such a concern. I'm talking about the Sports grants and the Carparks and the Community Development grants...
The exact amount of money that goes to make up these various funds is difficult to make out. In part it's because successive Budgets have allocated money into various discretionary funds. In part because it's unclear at times how much money has been allocated or spent.
But first, let's look at how these things are supposed to work.
1. A government department - Infrastructure, for example - will publish a list of grant criteria and invite submissions from the relevant groups. Councils, state governments, community groups etc.
I wanted to dive into this topic to add some context around why the proposed reductions to JobSeeker and JobKeeper make little sense when you take into account the state of the economy as a whole, and the way businesses think...
Let’s start with the economy. We have been experiencing a slowing in the Australian economy for the past six or so years, culminating in the recession coinciding with the economic fallout of our health response to the pandemic. (The recession wasn’t *caused* by the pandemic.)