Mark Jacobson, of Stanford and the Solutions Project, has added another technology to his WWS (wind, water, sun) recipe for net zero. He doubles down on the “no new technology needed” theme by a delightful encomium to Bronze Age inventors: fire bricks. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/stanford-study-supports-use-of-fire-bricks-for-process-heat/ These are simply clay bricks of specific compositions fired at high temperatures to vitrify them. They have been used for centuries to line kilns, blast furnaces and other environments where you need high temperatures. Jacobson‘s proposal is to use them for storing heat to run industrial processes, added and removed by simple air fans. The raw materials are abundant, the technology is brain-dead simple, and the bricks last a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_brick
Wikipedia gives the originator of modern fire bricks as William Weston Young in the Neath Valley of Wales, in 1822. Of course he was just systematizing a practice going back 3,000 years, to the very beginning of metallurgy in the Bronze Age. China had blast furnaces under the Han dynasty. We should add the kiln to the very short list of truly revolutionary inventions, for without sustained high temperatures – hotter than achievable in an open fire - the smelting of metals is SFIK impossible.
You have to hand it to the Neolithic metallurgists. What they invented was not in the least an incremental development of stone tools, but something entirely new, with a lot of moving parts. First they had to find copper ore, and work out how to smelt it to make cooking pots, jewellery and mirrors – copper is too soft for weapons and sickles. Then they had to find tin ore, which is uncommon, and required long-distance trade to the few mines. Tin by itself is not very useful, though you can improve copper cooking pots by lining them with tin, and make better mirrors. Finally they needed some very long-shot experiments alloying copper and tin. Miraculously, what you get is bronze: a superb metal, very hard, resistant to corrosion, taking a sharp edge, and indefinitely recyclable. Bronze is still, in spite of the high cost, the material of choice today for ships’ propellers and large cast sculptures. The introduction of bronze was not an unmixed blessing. The superiority of bronze weapons and armour promoted the rise of a caste of professional warriors, like Homer’s Achilles and his Myrmidon followers, against whom peasants armed with stone weapons stood no chance. We are still living with the after-effects of this social revolution into hierarchy, which has outlasted several changes in the technology of conflict, from bronze spears to cheaper steel to warships, guns and planes. Early furnaces were very inefficient and gobbled up vast quantities of wood, which bronze axes made easier to cut, leaning to the mass deforestation of Mediterranean hillsides lamented by Plato (Critias 111).
A footnote: bronze statues from antiquity are rare, compared to marble ones, and most of them come from shipwrecks. The reason is that a bronze sculpture in a city, unlike a marble one, is a standing invitation to recyclers in need of weapons or wanting to honour a new leader or divinity. The sea floor is much safer.
Lignin and cellulose together make up almost all of the ingredients of wood, but versatile cellulose gets all the love. It interestingly forms tubes through which a plant’s vital fluids circulate, especially water and sugars. Bacteria, fungi, and animals can eat cellulose, which humans can exploit for biofuels. Lignin just sits there, a brown glue holding plants together, offering he negative virtues of hardness, stiffness and resistance to attack. It is no use in paper-making, so 100mt of the stuff is produced every year, treated as nearly worthless, and simply burnt as a cheap fuel for sawmills and paper mills. A team of American researchers at NREL have a clever idea to tweak lignin into a form where it can replace synthetic epoxy in the small but operational niche of high-spec epoxy concrete. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/nrel-researchers-pave-the-way-for-carbon-negative-concrete/ The press release is light on details, but a quick search on Google Scholar (+lignin +epoxy +concrete) suggests that processed lignin is an active subfield of materials science.
The one snag I can see is that 100mt is not a big number in the global cement industry, which makes 4 bn tons a year of the stuff. Even if all the available lignin were diverted into the quasi-epoxy substitute, it would barely dent the cement emissions problem. Still, a million tons here, a million tons there, and pretty soon you are talking real cuts.
Although it doesn't seem to be the dominant view, I've thought for a while that the Bronze Age collapse was due to the arrival of iron weapons, which allowed marauding raiders (the mysterious Sea Peoples among them) to defeat the civilised (city-dwelling )professionals
Iron is too brittle to take an edge and is fragile. It took the invention of steel…adding carbon to the process to produce a very versatile metal…but still expensive to produce. Process probably developed in a few places no doubt but Anatolia in Europe. Probably too late to impact Bronze Age Collapse which was multifactorial. A very stable geopolitical and trade civilisation went under in 50 years or so. Our civilisation should take note of historical precedents…technology won’t solve all your problems!
Surely steel is much cheaper to produce than bronze? Iron ore is very common and the carbon you must add to make steel is already there in your charcoal fuel. So if your plan is to conquer the world, or at least have fun smashing up a few cities, you can cet. par. equip a much bigger army with steel weapons, not just a few aristos like Achilles and a boatload of his retainers. Steel democratizes warfare, unless you are unlucky enough to be Aztec or Inca stuck with stone weapons.
Example. My distant ancestor William Wimberley provably fought at Bosworth Field in 1485 as a retainer of Lord Stanley - presumably as a man-at-arms not a common soldier, since he was granted some confiscated Yorkist land afterwards. Richard III was surrounded and killed by Stanley's men, probably men-at arms as it would have been too dangerous for unarmoured pikemen and archers. Richard had the best armour and sword money could buy, but the modest difference in quality of steel gear was outweighed by numbers. Neither William W. nor his mates claimed the close-combat kill, and the guy who took Richard´s crown to Henry Tudor claimed he had found it hanging in a bush: a likely story. Killing a king, even a Bad King, is dangerous, and I think those responsible sensibly chose to keep a low profile; just as the prudent Henry, and the equally prudent kingmaker Stanley, chose not to investigate.
Steel only became inexpensive to produce with the introduction of the Bessemer process in the mid 19th century. Prior to that steel was difficult to produce in quantity and the right consistent quality. Burning off impurities and adding the right amount of carbon was more an art than a consistent process. Sure it was used for weapons and other more useful items but it wasn’t until the mid 19:th century that it could be produced in bulk for weapons and building. The Iron or rather steel age didn’t really start till that time.
"We demand more mutually beneficial market transactions between consenting adults that do not create any untaxed/unsubsidized negative/positive externalities (with some exceptions for transactions in addictive substances and services) and for some of the income generated from those mutually beneficial transactions taxed with a progressive consumption taxes and the revenues used for redistribution and for purchase of public goods whose expenditures pass an NPV>0 test when inputs and outputs are valued at Pigou tax/subsidy inclusive prices!"
John Cadogan, who believes AGW is a serious problem but EV vehicles are a bit of a joke, has crunched the numbers on lifetime CO2 emissions for a Tesla Y ($90K)and a Mazda 2 ($30K) and found that given Australia's current energy mix, the Mazda 2 produces ~10% fewer emissions. All the numbers he uses in his calculation are impeccably sourced and his assumptions are reasonable.
Cadogan points out that even if you alter the numbers to be more favourable for the EV, anyone with a spare $90K and a genuine concern about CO2 emissions would make an order of magnitude greater impact by installing solar panels, battery backup, better home insulation, double glazed windows, and so on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vybnoHVHMdQ
Meanwhile DW report that South Koreans are increasingly reluctant to buy EVs because of the horrific and highly toxic fires they are causing: "On August 1, a Mercedes-Benz EV caught fire in the underground parking lot of an apartment complex in the city of Incheon. It took firefighters more than eight hours to extinguish the blaze. Twenty-three people required hospital treatment, around 140 vehicles were damaged, and 1,600 homes were affected by electricity and water outages for a week."
Until EVs become markedly safer and more efficient, the Oz government should not be promoting them.
A vocabulary test for politicians, businesspeople, civil servants and consultants promoting billion-dollar schemes. Are they familiar with the following terms: fat-tail risks, grey rhinos, positive and negative learning curves, availability bias, Lego modularity? If not, keep them far away from large pots of money, nuclear reactors, tunnels, and the Olympic Games.
I missed the ‘ask me anything’ week but have been wanting to ask a question for a while now: Do government effectively print money by setting a low reserve ratio for bank lending? Despite large amounts burrowed for speculation, I’m assuming most money is lent to businesses for the production of real goods and services to supply growing consumer demand. Money is created to provide most of the cash for these loans is created of thin air but is not inflationary while there is capacity for growth in the economy. New resources, labour and/or land is exploited. Or, as is increasingly the case, I think, existing resources, land and labour is more efficiently exploited with better technology. This increase in economic activity requires an increase in money supply.
Am I right in thinking that a low reserve ratio therefore acts as an automatic printing press that supplies money so that real economic growth can take place? I realise that this ‘new money’ also feeds speculative churn which uses most of the cash in circulation but it seems that this is normally how money is issued to facilitate normal economic activity and the state only issues money when there is unemployed capacity and risk of recession.
I have been thinking about this for a while watching debates on crypto, inflation and debt and it puts arguments of the evils of printing money in a different complexion. It also seems like a good way for governments to distance themselves, rightly or wrongly, from the responsibility of issuing new money.
John Maynard Keynes often talked about the “money illusion”. His point revolved around real values and money values. Due to inflation the money value of a good may not indicate its real value. For example if I pay 3 per cent more for a good but the inflation rate is 4 per cent;then I have paid less for that good in real terms. When talking about wages, prices, GDP and retail sales; attention should be paid to the inflation rate. Only then can real trends be discerned. The RBA constantly harps back to what it calls “services inflation”. But it fails to admit that adjusted for the weighting assigned to this area in CPI calculations, this one factor cannot be used to justify keeping interest rates high. It’s just like the earlier wage-price spiral myth it used to justify earlier increases. Once called out on this, the RBA switched to using “services inflation” as its excuse for maintaining higher rates. A bit of open transparency would be appreciated by heavily mortgages householders. It’s the least they deserve.
I have a specific challenge - I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of the difference between printing money and borrowing from overseas. Is there a logical reason why borrowing funds from overseas is better than printing money? The one exception I can think of is where the funds are needed to pay for imports, as is the case in countries such as the US.
Overseas borrowing may help pay for imports if the country lacks an export base, but whilst an inflow exists this keeps the exchange rate higher than it otherwise would be, thereby making the country less competitive, as I would contend is the case with the US.
A case could be made that overseas funds are needed to pay for imported capital goods necessary to create an export industry - but even then, fees, "costs", and the surplus is typically expatriated, so each case would need to be evaluated.
Unless OS borrowings are invested in imports required to establish export industries, borrowings result in a negative cash flow:
Obviously overseas borrowing, and the resultant interest and repayments, does impact the Balance of Payments and the exchange rate, and this has kept many countries in penury as a result.
This is complicated by the fact that external debt is typically denominated in other currencies and increases if the local currency loses value. So, in Australia's case, borrowing from OS leads to capital outflow and pressure on the dollar, a lower dollar increases our indebtedness from what it would otherwise have been.
Hi David, as you say at the end, there's a big difference if the debt is denominated in foreign currencies. But Australian government debt is denominated in $A, so borrowing from foreigners to pay for imported goods is quite similar to printing money and paying them cash.
More generally, what matters most is the real exchange of goods that is involved. As a first approximation, the financing mechanism only affects the price level (also posthing this in Ask Me Anything)
I'm looking forward to reading historian Mark Dapin's new book Lest: Australian War Myths. After an extract from the book in the Weekend Australian Magazine of July 13-14, denying the old furphy of Vietnam veterans attacked by activists, the indignant letters over the following two weeks have been as weak as water. One told us of a hockey team from the Officer Cadet School playing at Monash University in 1971, and "most spectators were not appreciative of our presence." The truth teller forgot to mention the then uproar, due to the University's plan for a Monash Regiment building, or the expulsion of student leaders the year before for occupying the Careers and Appointments Office, who hosted Dow Chemical (napalm makers), and IBM (creators of the "electronic battlefield"). Some of us drew on personal experience to object to this myth-making 20 years ago https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=315, but Dapin forensically and methodically proved it in his previous books about Vietnam, being unable to find any mention of such events in any media, histories or Left memoirs. WIth one exception: typist Nadine Jensen, a typist from Campbelltown, doused herself in red paint and kerosine, and ran into a homecoming march - in June 1966! As he said, "She was fined 6 pounds, and disappeared from history."
If this attention on events of 50 years ago is Murdoch testing out a new front for his culture wars, it looks like a dead end. So I won't bang on further - George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said “Never wrestle with a pig because you'll both get dirty and the pig likes it."
The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population last year stated that earth can sustainably support (at a reasonable standard of living) fewer than 4 billion people. The UN notes current world population is over 8 billion.
In Australia, pet cats kill 323 million native birds/mammals/reptiles each year.
My new (Australian-made) T-shirt reads: ‘Childless, Catless, Responsible, Happy.’
I think that should read cats in general. Feral cats certainly do… pet cats much less and zero if confined adequately. Humans would kill far more clearing land for housing and agriculture not to mention what is eaten. My take is less humans more of everything else!
Two nice items of green tech news today.
Mark Jacobson, of Stanford and the Solutions Project, has added another technology to his WWS (wind, water, sun) recipe for net zero. He doubles down on the “no new technology needed” theme by a delightful encomium to Bronze Age inventors: fire bricks. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/stanford-study-supports-use-of-fire-bricks-for-process-heat/ These are simply clay bricks of specific compositions fired at high temperatures to vitrify them. They have been used for centuries to line kilns, blast furnaces and other environments where you need high temperatures. Jacobson‘s proposal is to use them for storing heat to run industrial processes, added and removed by simple air fans. The raw materials are abundant, the technology is brain-dead simple, and the bricks last a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_brick
Wikipedia gives the originator of modern fire bricks as William Weston Young in the Neath Valley of Wales, in 1822. Of course he was just systematizing a practice going back 3,000 years, to the very beginning of metallurgy in the Bronze Age. China had blast furnaces under the Han dynasty. We should add the kiln to the very short list of truly revolutionary inventions, for without sustained high temperatures – hotter than achievable in an open fire - the smelting of metals is SFIK impossible.
You have to hand it to the Neolithic metallurgists. What they invented was not in the least an incremental development of stone tools, but something entirely new, with a lot of moving parts. First they had to find copper ore, and work out how to smelt it to make cooking pots, jewellery and mirrors – copper is too soft for weapons and sickles. Then they had to find tin ore, which is uncommon, and required long-distance trade to the few mines. Tin by itself is not very useful, though you can improve copper cooking pots by lining them with tin, and make better mirrors. Finally they needed some very long-shot experiments alloying copper and tin. Miraculously, what you get is bronze: a superb metal, very hard, resistant to corrosion, taking a sharp edge, and indefinitely recyclable. Bronze is still, in spite of the high cost, the material of choice today for ships’ propellers and large cast sculptures. The introduction of bronze was not an unmixed blessing. The superiority of bronze weapons and armour promoted the rise of a caste of professional warriors, like Homer’s Achilles and his Myrmidon followers, against whom peasants armed with stone weapons stood no chance. We are still living with the after-effects of this social revolution into hierarchy, which has outlasted several changes in the technology of conflict, from bronze spears to cheaper steel to warships, guns and planes. Early furnaces were very inefficient and gobbled up vast quantities of wood, which bronze axes made easier to cut, leaning to the mass deforestation of Mediterranean hillsides lamented by Plato (Critias 111).
A footnote: bronze statues from antiquity are rare, compared to marble ones, and most of them come from shipwrecks. The reason is that a bronze sculpture in a city, unlike a marble one, is a standing invitation to recyclers in need of weapons or wanting to honour a new leader or divinity. The sea floor is much safer.
Lignin and cellulose together make up almost all of the ingredients of wood, but versatile cellulose gets all the love. It interestingly forms tubes through which a plant’s vital fluids circulate, especially water and sugars. Bacteria, fungi, and animals can eat cellulose, which humans can exploit for biofuels. Lignin just sits there, a brown glue holding plants together, offering he negative virtues of hardness, stiffness and resistance to attack. It is no use in paper-making, so 100mt of the stuff is produced every year, treated as nearly worthless, and simply burnt as a cheap fuel for sawmills and paper mills. A team of American researchers at NREL have a clever idea to tweak lignin into a form where it can replace synthetic epoxy in the small but operational niche of high-spec epoxy concrete. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/05/nrel-researchers-pave-the-way-for-carbon-negative-concrete/ The press release is light on details, but a quick search on Google Scholar (+lignin +epoxy +concrete) suggests that processed lignin is an active subfield of materials science.
The one snag I can see is that 100mt is not a big number in the global cement industry, which makes 4 bn tons a year of the stuff. Even if all the available lignin were diverted into the quasi-epoxy substitute, it would barely dent the cement emissions problem. Still, a million tons here, a million tons there, and pretty soon you are talking real cuts.
Although it doesn't seem to be the dominant view, I've thought for a while that the Bronze Age collapse was due to the arrival of iron weapons, which allowed marauding raiders (the mysterious Sea Peoples among them) to defeat the civilised (city-dwelling )professionals
Iron is too brittle to take an edge and is fragile. It took the invention of steel…adding carbon to the process to produce a very versatile metal…but still expensive to produce. Process probably developed in a few places no doubt but Anatolia in Europe. Probably too late to impact Bronze Age Collapse which was multifactorial. A very stable geopolitical and trade civilisation went under in 50 years or so. Our civilisation should take note of historical precedents…technology won’t solve all your problems!
Surely steel is much cheaper to produce than bronze? Iron ore is very common and the carbon you must add to make steel is already there in your charcoal fuel. So if your plan is to conquer the world, or at least have fun smashing up a few cities, you can cet. par. equip a much bigger army with steel weapons, not just a few aristos like Achilles and a boatload of his retainers. Steel democratizes warfare, unless you are unlucky enough to be Aztec or Inca stuck with stone weapons.
Example. My distant ancestor William Wimberley provably fought at Bosworth Field in 1485 as a retainer of Lord Stanley - presumably as a man-at-arms not a common soldier, since he was granted some confiscated Yorkist land afterwards. Richard III was surrounded and killed by Stanley's men, probably men-at arms as it would have been too dangerous for unarmoured pikemen and archers. Richard had the best armour and sword money could buy, but the modest difference in quality of steel gear was outweighed by numbers. Neither William W. nor his mates claimed the close-combat kill, and the guy who took Richard´s crown to Henry Tudor claimed he had found it hanging in a bush: a likely story. Killing a king, even a Bad King, is dangerous, and I think those responsible sensibly chose to keep a low profile; just as the prudent Henry, and the equally prudent kingmaker Stanley, chose not to investigate.
Steel only became inexpensive to produce with the introduction of the Bessemer process in the mid 19th century. Prior to that steel was difficult to produce in quantity and the right consistent quality. Burning off impurities and adding the right amount of carbon was more an art than a consistent process. Sure it was used for weapons and other more useful items but it wasn’t until the mid 19:th century that it could be produced in bulk for weapons and building. The Iron or rather steel age didn’t really start till that time.
My "Neo-Social Democracy" manifesto: :)
"We demand more mutually beneficial market transactions between consenting adults that do not create any untaxed/unsubsidized negative/positive externalities (with some exceptions for transactions in addictive substances and services) and for some of the income generated from those mutually beneficial transactions taxed with a progressive consumption taxes and the revenues used for redistribution and for purchase of public goods whose expenditures pass an NPV>0 test when inputs and outputs are valued at Pigou tax/subsidy inclusive prices!"
Needs work for the T-shirt.
Here's mine: we should try to be more like Norway.
John Cadogan, who believes AGW is a serious problem but EV vehicles are a bit of a joke, has crunched the numbers on lifetime CO2 emissions for a Tesla Y ($90K)and a Mazda 2 ($30K) and found that given Australia's current energy mix, the Mazda 2 produces ~10% fewer emissions. All the numbers he uses in his calculation are impeccably sourced and his assumptions are reasonable.
Cadogan points out that even if you alter the numbers to be more favourable for the EV, anyone with a spare $90K and a genuine concern about CO2 emissions would make an order of magnitude greater impact by installing solar panels, battery backup, better home insulation, double glazed windows, and so on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vybnoHVHMdQ
Meanwhile DW report that South Koreans are increasingly reluctant to buy EVs because of the horrific and highly toxic fires they are causing: "On August 1, a Mercedes-Benz EV caught fire in the underground parking lot of an apartment complex in the city of Incheon. It took firefighters more than eight hours to extinguish the blaze. Twenty-three people required hospital treatment, around 140 vehicles were damaged, and 1,600 homes were affected by electricity and water outages for a week."
Until EVs become markedly safer and more efficient, the Oz government should not be promoting them.
Big projects fail
Thought-provoking exchange between Mike Barnard and guru Bent Flyvbjerg on the latter's pioneering research on failure in big projects. https://cleantechnica.com/2024/08/14/how-big-things-get-done-talking-with-megaproject-expert-professor-bent-flyvbjerg/ The share of these that are delivered on time, within budget, and yield the expected benefits is 0.5%.
A vocabulary test for politicians, businesspeople, civil servants and consultants promoting billion-dollar schemes. Are they familiar with the following terms: fat-tail risks, grey rhinos, positive and negative learning curves, availability bias, Lego modularity? If not, keep them far away from large pots of money, nuclear reactors, tunnels, and the Olympic Games.
Headline today in the Guardian:
"Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus to head Bangladesh’s interim government"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/07/muhammad-yunus-bangladesh-interim-government-pm-sheikh-hasina
All power to the Soviet of anti-neoliberal economists! JQ should be buffing his cv in case he gets the call from Caracas or Khartoum.
Hi John,
I missed the ‘ask me anything’ week but have been wanting to ask a question for a while now: Do government effectively print money by setting a low reserve ratio for bank lending? Despite large amounts burrowed for speculation, I’m assuming most money is lent to businesses for the production of real goods and services to supply growing consumer demand. Money is created to provide most of the cash for these loans is created of thin air but is not inflationary while there is capacity for growth in the economy. New resources, labour and/or land is exploited. Or, as is increasingly the case, I think, existing resources, land and labour is more efficiently exploited with better technology. This increase in economic activity requires an increase in money supply.
Am I right in thinking that a low reserve ratio therefore acts as an automatic printing press that supplies money so that real economic growth can take place? I realise that this ‘new money’ also feeds speculative churn which uses most of the cash in circulation but it seems that this is normally how money is issued to facilitate normal economic activity and the state only issues money when there is unemployed capacity and risk of recession.
I have been thinking about this for a while watching debates on crypto, inflation and debt and it puts arguments of the evils of printing money in a different complexion. It also seems like a good way for governments to distance themselves, rightly or wrongly, from the responsibility of issuing new money.
John Maynard Keynes often talked about the “money illusion”. His point revolved around real values and money values. Due to inflation the money value of a good may not indicate its real value. For example if I pay 3 per cent more for a good but the inflation rate is 4 per cent;then I have paid less for that good in real terms. When talking about wages, prices, GDP and retail sales; attention should be paid to the inflation rate. Only then can real trends be discerned. The RBA constantly harps back to what it calls “services inflation”. But it fails to admit that adjusted for the weighting assigned to this area in CPI calculations, this one factor cannot be used to justify keeping interest rates high. It’s just like the earlier wage-price spiral myth it used to justify earlier increases. Once called out on this, the RBA switched to using “services inflation” as its excuse for maintaining higher rates. A bit of open transparency would be appreciated by heavily mortgages householders. It’s the least they deserve.
I have a specific challenge - I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of the difference between printing money and borrowing from overseas. Is there a logical reason why borrowing funds from overseas is better than printing money? The one exception I can think of is where the funds are needed to pay for imports, as is the case in countries such as the US.
Overseas borrowing may help pay for imports if the country lacks an export base, but whilst an inflow exists this keeps the exchange rate higher than it otherwise would be, thereby making the country less competitive, as I would contend is the case with the US.
A case could be made that overseas funds are needed to pay for imported capital goods necessary to create an export industry - but even then, fees, "costs", and the surplus is typically expatriated, so each case would need to be evaluated.
Unless OS borrowings are invested in imports required to establish export industries, borrowings result in a negative cash flow:
(Borrowings) - (Interest) - (Debt Repayments) = (Outflow)
Obviously overseas borrowing, and the resultant interest and repayments, does impact the Balance of Payments and the exchange rate, and this has kept many countries in penury as a result.
This is complicated by the fact that external debt is typically denominated in other currencies and increases if the local currency loses value. So, in Australia's case, borrowing from OS leads to capital outflow and pressure on the dollar, a lower dollar increases our indebtedness from what it would otherwise have been.
What am I missing?
Hi David, as you say at the end, there's a big difference if the debt is denominated in foreign currencies. But Australian government debt is denominated in $A, so borrowing from foreigners to pay for imported goods is quite similar to printing money and paying them cash.
More generally, what matters most is the real exchange of goods that is involved. As a first approximation, the financing mechanism only affects the price level (also posthing this in Ask Me Anything)
I'm looking forward to reading historian Mark Dapin's new book Lest: Australian War Myths. After an extract from the book in the Weekend Australian Magazine of July 13-14, denying the old furphy of Vietnam veterans attacked by activists, the indignant letters over the following two weeks have been as weak as water. One told us of a hockey team from the Officer Cadet School playing at Monash University in 1971, and "most spectators were not appreciative of our presence." The truth teller forgot to mention the then uproar, due to the University's plan for a Monash Regiment building, or the expulsion of student leaders the year before for occupying the Careers and Appointments Office, who hosted Dow Chemical (napalm makers), and IBM (creators of the "electronic battlefield"). Some of us drew on personal experience to object to this myth-making 20 years ago https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=315, but Dapin forensically and methodically proved it in his previous books about Vietnam, being unable to find any mention of such events in any media, histories or Left memoirs. WIth one exception: typist Nadine Jensen, a typist from Campbelltown, doused herself in red paint and kerosine, and ran into a homecoming march - in June 1966! As he said, "She was fined 6 pounds, and disappeared from history."
If this attention on events of 50 years ago is Murdoch testing out a new front for his culture wars, it looks like a dead end. So I won't bang on further - George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have said “Never wrestle with a pig because you'll both get dirty and the pig likes it."
The International Union for the Scientific Study of Population last year stated that earth can sustainably support (at a reasonable standard of living) fewer than 4 billion people. The UN notes current world population is over 8 billion.
In Australia, pet cats kill 323 million native birds/mammals/reptiles each year.
My new (Australian-made) T-shirt reads: ‘Childless, Catless, Responsible, Happy.’
I think that should read cats in general. Feral cats certainly do… pet cats much less and zero if confined adequately. Humans would kill far more clearing land for housing and agriculture not to mention what is eaten. My take is less humans more of everything else!