Comments for Stubborn Mule

Comment on Deleveraging and Australian Property Prices by Lefty

Lefty — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:17:10 +0000

A number of our neigbours have simply given up trying to sell and taken their houses off the market. One young couple who have gotten themselves in too deep are trying to sell for what seems like a ridiculous price to me. I ran it through an online mortgage calculator under a number of different scenarios – it turns out that if interest rates were to return to where ther were just before the outbreak of the GFC, on a variable rate, the repayments on this mortgage would be more our entire combined monthly income – no food, no clothing, no nothing, just mortgage payments.

Average household incomes in this resource boom town may be higher than the national average but such prices still seem ludicrous.

Even the “priced-to-sell” house next door would still consume three-quaters of our entire income at pre-GFC rates.

We thank our lucky stars that we built our house just before the real estate boom kicked off and are paying less than 20% of our monthly income in mortgage costs.

Nationwide though, prices seem to show no sign of heading any way other than up (and Steve Keen will be taking that mountain walk).

Comment on Deleveraging and Australian Property Prices by Stubborn Mule

Stubborn Mule — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:20:16 +0000

Hookah: and sometimes the Government messes up by not intervening when they should!

Comment on Deleveraging and Australian Property Prices by Hookah

Hookah — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:38:01 +0000

seems like australia property prices are on par with the US. They both have the same delevaraging problems. dang government always messing stuff up.

Comment on Who are the big carbon emitters? by Stubborn Mule

Stubborn Mule — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:22:20 +0000

VerdantFlaneur: thanks for the links, I’ll look into them.

Bionic Man: the “CO2 is not a poison” argument has always struck me as one of the weakest in arguments against anthropogenic global warming. It seems rather like saying to a drowning man “don’t get worked up, water is not poison, it is the stuff of life!”.

Comment on Who are the big carbon emitters? by Bionic Man

Bionic Man — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:28:13 +0000

CO2 is not a poison it is needed by plants for survival. There is scientific debate about whether CO2 per se causes any temperature change and quoting from globalwarmfacts.com
“It’s a shame, the excess carbon dioxide could contribute to creating a greener planet (and the gain in albedo might save us from the next ice age). In the distant past, for millions of years, CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today (4500 parts per million then, versus 380 parts per million today), and that was a time of ice age temperatures. We can say the world is carbon dioxide deprived today”
The focus should be on sustainable and non poisonous energy sources not CO2 levels.

Comment on Is Australia taking its fair share of asylum-seekers? by David Ready

David Ready — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:20:03 +0000

Please do a graph of the number of homeless on any one night in Australia, overlaid with hospital waiting lists, and the Public Housing waiting lists in each State. A special line with the number of women and thier children living in cars would be a bonus.

Comment on Who are the big carbon emitters? by VerdantFlaneur

VerdantFlaneur — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:48:38 +0000

To get stuck into some deeper analysis, suggest you access some of the reports prepared by Citi’s Elaine Prior. She’s analysed the ASX200 in terms of emissions intensity (emissions/market cap), as well as potential CPRS exposure. Some material available here: http://bit.ly/b1Uup6 .

More recently she’s published a paper on the question of whether there is a link between greener buildings and value: http://bit.ly/bSaDku .

Much of her analysis has been derived from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) – a global voluntary carbon and climate change reporting program: http://www.cdproject.net (interestingly, only two ASX50 companies failed to report in 2009).

You will also find significant variation between NGERS data and CDP data given the application of different reporting boundaries. NGERS requires application of an operational boundary whereas CDP leaves boundary definition up to the company – typically companies have applied a financial boundary.

Comment on Who are the big carbon emitters? by OldFuzz

OldFuzz — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:23:52 +0000

Macquarie and Delta, the top two – are wholly owned by the NSW Gov’t still. While they generate profit for their one shareholder, their value should be measured not by profit but perhaps by carbon efficiency in providing the valued electrical energy to the community – eg perhaps all power generators could be ranked by tonnes of CO2/MWh .
The “hungry” consumers, largely including the big minimg companies who consume enormous quantities of diesel fuel and electricity do have a very active program of reduction – perhaps they should be ranked on some measure of reduction in energy consumed/tonne of product produced for the needy/hungry/wealthy consumers of their products?

Comment on Who are the big carbon emitters? by manny

manny — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:21:00 +0000

Great post.
I believe that since most greenhouse gas emissions are energy related (power plants, buildings, transport and industry), much of the answer in reducing emissions lies in new energy solutions – which both de-carbonise the supply of energy itself and reduce demand for power

Comment on Who are the big carbon emitters? by Stubborn Mule

Stubborn Mule — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:12:29 +0000

James: I was thinking much the same thing about bringing in profits. Next step is to find the data…

I have updated the post to note that Wesfarmers owns Coles. Since Woolies have their own trucks, I would have thought much of their transport emissions would appear in Scope 1. It may be that air and rail (provided by other companies) contribute to their Scope 2 emissions.