The Road to Hell.

Poor Joe Sixpack, he was getting desperate. He had been travelling for a while, always hoping to get to a better place. He took the bus but every stop was worse than the previous. It didn’t take him long to realise this one was the worst yet. Just after he got off the bus, there it was, a huge sign with the inscription “Welcome to the Fifth Circle of Hell. Population: 34 billion souls”.

“This Time, don’t Give the Liberals your Vote.”

Life is full of perverse, cruel irony. That sentence is a case in point.

----------

Alex Turnbull is no radical.

It would be nearly inconceivable for him to be a left-wing radical: before resigning his seat in Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull, Alex’s father and former Goldman Sachs partner, was Australia’s richest politician. Alex (against my rule, I’ll refer to him and his father by their first names, for brevity) is a hedge-fund manager based on Singapore.

Two More Optimistic Scenarios and Breaking News.

To counter wild allegations that I am an incurable pessimist, I’ll leave readers with the most optimistic scenario I could find for how this slow-motion train wreck of climate change is going to develop.

The Price of Survival.

I think there’s little need to repeat the dramatic pleas the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made last Monday: to avoid world average temperatures rising above 1.5°C greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 45% within the next 12 years and reach 0 (as in nada, zilch, rien) within 32.

There’s a detail, however, most commentators have overlooked. To achieve those reductions, in a capitalist economy, where prices are the rationing device par excellence, it “would require carbon prices that are three to four times higher than for a 2°C target” (Yes, maties, that was there, too).

----------