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This report applies a full-cost economics approach to climate change adaptation, using the aluminium industry as a case study to illustrate the complexity of the policy challenge. The report examines the positive value of jobs within the upstream aluminium industry, and the negative value of carbon emissions from the sector. It estimates the value which flows from aluminium jobs to individual workers and to the wider community. The report provides a demographic survey of aluminium towns and finds that aluminium towns are less economically vibrant than the Australian economy as a whole, with lower median incomes (despite high aluminium wages), lower employment and lower workforce participation. This highlights the critical importance of aluminium to these towns, employing thousands of local workers at an average wage more than double the national median.

Garnaut describes a few categories of economic modelling: The first category is ‘conventional market economic effects’, things you can measure and have data for. The scond category is ‘things you can measure and model but for which you have no real data’. Tourism falls into this category and so his core model excludes tourism for now. The third category is ‘things we value but that fall outside conteporary economic models’, things such as the Great Barrier Reef, which, when we lose them forever there’ll be a national sense of mourning. He emphasised that the numbers only tell a story in category one, tell a made up story in category two, and tell no story at all in category three.

A new era for solar power is approaching. Long derided as uneconomic, it is gaining ground as technologies improve and the cost of traditional energy sources rises. Within three to seven years, unsubsidized solar power could cost no more to end customers in many markets, such as California and Italy, than electricity generated by fossil fuels or by renewable alternatives to solar. By 2020, global installed solar capacity could be 20 to 40 times its level today.

Two news items from Reuters: Total U.S. ethanol capacity will hit 9.25 billion gallons in 2008. Six new ethanol plants opened this month alone. "About a dozen" biofuel plants have filed for bankruptcy, victims of high prices for corn and soybeans.

Rather than wait for Penny Wong, we thought we’d jump the gun with our own Paper on the options for addressing climate change. The key thing to bear in mind with all this stuff is what we are actually trying to achieve. Yes, yes, we’re trying to do something about the greenhouse effect, but what, specifically, and how? Answering that question properly leads into hotly-contested debates about economic and administrative efficiency, where tiny details can have vast and unforeseen real-world consequences.

The CEOs of 100 large multinational corporations -- including companies from carbon-intense industries -- have signed a World Economic Forum statement [PDF] that calls on the G8 to create a strategy to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050.

Unless gas hits $10 a gallon, Americans will continue to buy SUVs in droves. - Inspired by the continued sales of SUVs.