Fears of $400 million-a-year power price gouge trigger probe

Australia’s energy watchdog will investigate suspicions that electricity networks and gas pipelines have overcharged consumers by $400 million a year to cover their corporate tax bills.

The cost of poles and wires used to deliver electricity
 makes up 48 per cent of an average electricity bill.

Network charges have been the single biggest factor in rising household electricity bills over the past decade. The charges cover the cost of the "poles and wires" used to transmit and distribute electricity.

Electricity networks and gas pipeline businesses are allowed to cover their corporate tax liabilities by passing on the cost to consumers – usually totalling about $600 million a year.

However, it is understood the actual tax bill incurred by the networks may be about $200 million a year. This means consumers may have been charged three times more than needed to cover the tax liabilities, a possibility Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said was ‘‘totally unacceptable’’.

Read Nicole Hasham’s story from The Age - “Fears of $400 million-a-year power price gouge trigger probe.”

Drowning in garbage

Since early 2016, I have travelled to six major cities around the world (Jakarta, Tokyo, Lagos, New York, Sao Paulo and Amsterdam) to investigate how they manage — or mismanage — their waste. There are some remarkable differences. And a question emerges: Is this just garbage, or is it a resource?

Scavengers dig through the trash at Jakarta’s Bantar Gebang.

The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of solid waste a day, 10 times the amount a century ago, according to World Bank researchers. If nothing is done, that figure will grow to 11 million tons by the end of the century, the researchers estimate. On average, Americans throw away their own body weight in trash every month. In Japan, meanwhile, the typical person produces only two-thirds as much. It’s difficult to find comparable figures for the trash produced by mega-cities. But clearly, New York generates by far the most waste of the cities I visited: People in the broader metropolitan area throw away 33 million tons per year, according to a report by a global group of academics published in 2015 in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences. That’s 15 times the Lagos metropolitan area, their study found.

Read The Washington Post story by Kadir van Lohuizen - “Drowning in garbage.”

There’s no science behind denying climate change

“Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it’s all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.” -Mike Huckabee

Concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere
over the past few hundred thousand years.

If you didn’t know anything about climate science, about the Earth’s temperature, about carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, but you wanted to, how would you go about doing it? You’d begin by constructing a plan for how you’d accurately scientifically investigate the problem. You’d think about the data you’d need to collect and how you’d gather it. You’d think about the measurements you’d want to make and how to make them. You’d think about the sources of error and how to account for them: how to properly calibrate your data from all over the world and from many different time periods. And then you’d bring it together, under one enormous framework, to try and draw a scientifically robust conclusion.

Your first step would be to go out and try to measure the heat content of the planet. You’d measure the temperature of the air where you are, and you’d attempt to do it all over the world. The continents would be the easiest, and then you’d go after the oceans. The sea-level temperature would be low-hanging fruit, and then you’d have to go beyond the obvious to measure the heat trapped in the upper atmosphere and in the deeper waters of the seas. You’d try and measure it everywhere today, but also to reconstruct what it was in the past, going as far back as you can.

Read Ethan Siegal’s story - “There’s no science behind denying climate change.”