Politicians And Liberal Policy Makers Take Note: Buying Into The Bad Carbon Myth Is Damaging To Your Career

Obama is behind the curve again.  His advisers (or his teleprompter) are putting out totally flawed ideas that other governments around the world are recognizing as abysmal failures.  Here, now, I am referring to the idea of carbon taxes, carbon offsets, or any other schemes to raise tax revenues on the backs of higher energy prices for consumers.
 
Politicians around the world who bought into the idea of fossil fuel-burning, carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate change are realizing what a mistake they have made.  It is costing not only the public in terms of lost jobs, higher energy costs, and a lowered standard of living, but now as near bankruptcy looms, politicians are the ones feeling  the heat.  It will only get warmer in the frying pan these self-serving clowns (politicians) find themselves in.  The following article describes the problems liberal politicians in Australia are encountering because they have bought into the climate fear-mongering.  I have no sympathy.  They should, and do know better.  They have allowed the greed of carbon taxes overwhelm the obvious.  Man's activities are not causing catastrophic climate change, and to try and alter the global climate is political folly, or even suicide.  Eventually, the truth prevails.
Peter

Australia's carbon mess a warning to the world: Clyde Russell

     

 

The evil Mr. Carbon scaring the children.

 

 Source:

• http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/17/column-russell-carbon-australia-idUSL4N0FN0ER20130717?feedType=RSS&feedName=industrialsSector&rpc=43

 

Wed Jul 17, 2013 1:47am EDT

--Clyde Russell is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own.--
By Clyde Russell
LAUNCESTON, Australia, July 17 (Reuters) - Any government thinking of introducing policies to limit carbon emissions should look at Australia for an example of how not to do it.
Australia's efforts to combat climate change have been poison to politicians from all sides of the debate, contributing so far to the demise of two prime ministers and an opposition leader, and there may be more to come.

The latest twist has seen Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decide to switch from a straight tax on carbon emissions to a floating emissions trading scheme (ETS) a year earlier than planned.

This has nothing to do with improving the workings of the scheme or limiting carbon emissions and everything to do with trying to win back voters angered by rising electricity prices and industries that have seen their international competitiveness eroded by the tax.

The theory is that power and other prices will decline as the cost of carbon permits is expected to be around A$6 per tonne - the level at which European permits are currently priced - compared to the tax of A$25.40 ($23.09) per tonne that had been planned from July 2014.

Assuming European carbon permits don't rise in price, which is a fairly big call given efforts to reduce the supply of permits, Rudd's changes will save the average Australian household A$4 a week in electricity costs.

Whether this is enough to assuage public anger and help Rudd's Labor Party win re-election will become clear in the coming months as he has to call a federal election by end-November.
But Rudd's efforts to remove the carbon tax as an election issue only serve to underline how badly the whole thing has been handled.

When Rudd was first elected prime minister in 2007 he called climate change the "greatest moral, social and economic challenge of our time", signed Australia up to the Kyoto Protocol and proceeded to design an ETS.

This even enjoyed rare bi-partisan support from the then leader of the Liberal opposition Malcolm Turnbull.

However, it was Turnbull's support for the ETS that helped undo his leadership and he was ousted by his colleagues in December 2009, being replaced by the more conservative Tony Abbott, who withdrew his party's support for Rudd's plans.

Rudd's own popularity fell as he struggled to gain public support for his carbon scheme and a controversial new mining tax, leading to his ouster in a party coup in June 2010.
His replacement as prime minister, Julia Gillard, scrapped the planned ETS, making a promise that any government she led wouldn't introduce a carbon tax.

This commitment came back to haunt her after the August 2010 election, in which she managed to hang on to power by cutting a deal with Australian Greens and two conservative independent lawmakers to form a minority government.

Part of her agreement with the Greens was the introduction of a carbon tax with a fixed price per tonne of emissions up until July 2015, at which point it would change to a floating, traded price.
The broken promise was seized upon at every opportunity by the Liberal opposition and conservative media commentators, and in turn contributed to Gillard's poor performance in opinion polls.
When these polls showed her Labor Party heading for a massive defeat in an election she scheduled for September, her colleagues once again ousted a prime minister, bringing back Rudd in a party room vote last month.

Rudd's popularity with the public has seen the Labor Party inch closer to the Liberals in opinion polls, putting pressure on Abbott, who courted ridicule as a climate sceptic earlier this week by describing the ETS as a "so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance".
However, the Liberals are still ahead in opinion polls and if they win the upcoming election, Abbott has promised to scrap the carbon tax and the move to an ETS, replacing it with what he terms "direct action" on climate change.

But even if his party does win the election, it may not control both houses of parliament, and the lack of a majority in the upper house Senate may cruel Abbott's plans, as legislation has to clear both chambers.

It's little wonder that businesses and the public want some kind of resolution to the issue, but the upcoming vote may not deliver this, at least not immediately.
Part of the problem with Gillard's carbon tax is that it was more of a welfare programme than a plan to reduce emissions.

The tax raised was used to fund a raft of welfare measures to compensate for the higher prices caused by the tax.
The plans of both Rudd and Abbott would see the revenue from the tax fall dramatically or disappear altogether, but the welfare payments would remain, leaving the nation's budget with the worst possible outcome.
Rudd said his plan to move earlier to an ETS would cost the budget some A$4 billion, which would be recouped through spending cuts and tightening rules around company-funded vehicles for employees.

Abbott has so far only promised to end a small portion of welfare payments and seek spending cuts across the government.
Absent from both plans is much talk about climate change and carbon emissions.
Australia is the world's 15th-largest polluter and the highest per capita in the developed world, largely as a result of 80 percent of power being coal-fired and the prevalence of carbon-intensive industries such as mining and liquefied natural gas plants.

The existing carbon tax may actually be able to claim some credit for reducing emissions, with Australia's overall greenhouse gas emissions dropping 0.2 percent in 2012 from the prior year, and those from electricity generation by 4.7 percent.
But this success, while modest, is completely drowned out by the political machinations.
What the Australian experience shows is that any government tackling climate change needs as broad a consensus as possible, and that it should be done for the right reasons, not political expediency

Environmentalists Screw It Up Down Under

It is not just in the U.S.A. that "environmentalists" and their liberal elitist enablers screw things up in their ignorance of science and basic economics.  I won't even mention their lack of knowledge about human nature.  The utterly absurd and unfounded belief in the myth of man-caused global warming has led and is leading to disasters such as this in Australia, and is being repeated around the world.

Let your politicians know enough is enough.  End the nonsense!
Peter

Dam their flood of mistakes

Written by Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun | June 06 2012

Upstream on the Mitchell Rive (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

FLOODS? On Gippsland's Mitchell River? Again? What a surprise to anyone stupid enough to trust the warmist politicians who recently ran this sorry state.
Remember how the Bracks and Brumby governments refused to build a cheap dam on the Mitchell River for a quarter of the price of their $5.7 billion desalination plant?

Remember how Labor even turned the dam reservation on the Mitchell into a national park to stop anyone else from building a dam on Victoria's fastest-flowing river - a dam to harvest cheap water for booming Melbourne and minimise the flooding you're now seeing downstream?

Remember premier John Brumby insisting global warming was drying up our rains, so a new dam would be useless since "we don't lack for storage, we lack for rain"?
Remember Melbourne Water parroting the same warming creed, arguing against a dam on the Mitchell because a "rainfall-dependent water source in the face of rapidly changing climate patterns is very risky"?

Yeah, right.
Now let's remember what came next.

Let's remember how the undammed Mitchell flooded in 2007, sending a year's worth of drinking water for Melbourne down to the sea.

Let's remember how pigheaded Labor nevertheless ploughed ahead with its desalination plant, now hopelessly behind schedule and over budget.
Read rest…

The Climate AND Attitudes Are Changing!

Things sure get interesting when the mainstream media allows questions to be asked about the causes of the climate climate change phenomena usually blamed on man-caused global warming. In this case the common periods of draught in Australia receive an alternate explanation. Then given a chance, the fears of dying coral reefs, drowning polar bears, increased hurricanes, flooding, and heat waves will all be shown to be part of a natural, not man-caused, pattern of climate change.

Let us hope the following article is an example of a shift in attitude from one of Al Gore and Jim Hansen-type climate alarmism, to one of reason and common sense.
Peter

The climate sure is changing when doubt gets an airing
Written by Andrew Bolt, Melbourne Herald Sun
Tuesday, 21 April 2009

HMM, I could be wrong. Maybe the climate is changing after all. The intellectual climate, I mean. For years it's been a social crime to doubt man is heating the world to hell.

But suddenly the ice is cracking - and no, not the ice around Antarctica, which has actually grown. Take a few signs from last week alone. Australia's pre-eminent academic geologist, Prof Ian Plimer, published Heaven and Earth, challenging the gospel that the world is warming dangerously and that human-caused gases are to blame.

In fact, says Plimer, what warming we saw until a decade ago was not unusual, not dangerous and most likely caused mainly by solar activity. What's more, temperatures now seem to be falling.

While true, this kind of talk has been enough - until recently - to get you defamed as crazy or corrupt. Only last November, Plimer had a leper's bell rung over his head when he appeared on the ABC's Lateline Business, with presenter Ticky Fullerton warning he was "a geologist, not a climatologist" who "by definition works closely with the mining industry". Cross yourselves!
(When did the ABC last warn viewers that Al Gore "is an ex-politician, not a climatologist", and Tim Flannery "is a mammal expert, not a climatologist"?)

Then came Fullerton's "how-corrupt-are-you" question: "You are a greenhouse heretic . . . Is this scepticism genuine, or it it also about economic self-interest?"
(Has the ABC asked Flannery: "Is your warming belief genuine, or is it also about the $50,000 speaking fees?")

So what's changed? Perhaps not that much, but Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan, long a warming alarmist, did last week praise Plimer's book to the cooling heavens, and confess he could have been wrong in his own warming faith.

On Wednesday, another shock. The ABC's evangelical PM program did, true, report stock predictions of doom from alarmist scientists, but not before giving air time to two sceptical ones who'd given evidence to a Senate inquiry into the Rudd Government's planned emissions trading scheme.

And so listeners heard environmental engineer Prof Stewart Franks, say the West "has been railroaded into this notion of disastrous climate change for which there is no empirical evidence".

They also heard environmental geologist Prof Bob Carter warn that even if the world resumed warming, the Rudd scheme would at best cut temperatures by a thousandth of a degree, but at an insane cost.

And on Saturday came the final straw in the wind - even the ABC's AM gave Plimer an interview, albeit not without some alarmist at the end to "balance" his views as Flannery's never are.

By then Plimer's publisher had already sold an extraordinary 5000 copies of Heaven and Earth in just a week to a public clearly having second thoughts about all the warming hype.

By then, too, other researchers had given yet another reason to doubt.
The University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre has now found that our Big Dry is not unusual and not caused by global warming (as the Government insists), announcing: "The causes of southeastern Australia's longest, most severe and damaging droughts have been discovered, with the surprise finding that they originate far away in the Indian Ocean.

"A team of Australian scientists has detailed for the first time how a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole - a variable and irregular cycle of warming and cooling of ocean water - dictates whether moisture-bearing winds are carried across the southern half of Australia."
This explanation "challenges the accepted understanding of the key drivers of Australia's climate", the centre added. No kidding?

I hope the example of last week's three sceptical scientists - and of the NSW climate change researchers - inspires others to now cry that the emperor has no clothes. Or, rather, that he's wearing a jumper, it's got so cool.

You see, in just one week this month, I talked to three federal frontbenchers (two Labor), one prominent union leader and two media stars who all doubt man is warming the planet dangerously, but do not dare tell you. Indeed, I'd now reckon a quarter of Labor's frontbenchers and more than half of the Liberals' are closet sceptics.

It is tragic that so many smart people are too scared to say what they believe, especially when it's true. I blame most our crusading don't-argue media.

I wonder how much public opinion would turn against the warming scare if such sceptics came out and declared themselves. What a blow they'd strike not just for this country, but for reason.

But for now we still remain the prey of warming priests, carpet-baggers and the barking mad. The climate may be changing, but not enough for many sceptics to yet dare step outside.
Source

Delusions Down Under About Global Warming And Climate Change

Environmental global warming alarmists are not limited to North America and Europe...sadly, this delusional illness also exists in Australia and New Zealand. We must help them escape the quagmire of deceit known as the myth of man-caused global warming. Peter


ANDREW BOLT: DOOMED TO A FATAL DELUSION OVER CLIMATE CHANGE
The Herald Sun, 9 July 2008
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23991257-25717,00.html

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of "climate change delusion"- and they haven't even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon". "A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Bra(n)zen, but I digress.)

"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies." But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more forpetrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ." Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this -- and must -- but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash. Rudd and Garnaut want to scare you into backing their plan to force people who produce everything from petrol to coal-fired electricity, from steel to soft drinks, to pay for licences to emit carbon dioxide --the gas they think is heating the world to hell. The cost of those licences, totalling in the billions, will then be passed on to you through higher bills for petrol, power, food, housing,air travel and anything else that uses lots of gassy power. In some countries they're even planning to tax farting cows, so there's no end to the ways you can be stung.

Rudd hopes this pain will make you switch to expensive but less gassy alternatives, and -- hey presto -- the world's temperature will then fall, just like it's actually done since the day Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth. But you'll have spotted already the big flaw in Rudd's mad plan -- one that confirms he and Garnaut really do have delusions. The truth is Australia on its own emits less than 1.5 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide. Any savings we make will make no real difference, given that China (now the biggest emitter) and India (the fourth) are booming so fast that they alone will pump out 42 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases by 2030.

Indeed, so fast are the world's emissions growing -- by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants -- that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That's how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter. And that's why Rudd's claim that we'll be ruined if we don't cut Australia's gases is a lie. To be blunt.

Ask Rudd's guru. Garnaut on Friday admitted any cuts we make will be useless unless they inspire other countries to do the same -- especially China and India: "Only a global agreement has any prospect of reducing risks of dangerous climate change to acceptable levels." So almost everything depends on China and India copying us. But the chances of that? A big, round zero.

A year ago China released its own global warming strategy -- its own Garnaut report -- which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions. Said Ma Kai, head of China's powerful State Council: "China does not commit to any quantified emissions-reduction commitments . . . our efforts to fight climate change must not come at the expense of economic growth." In fact, we had to get used to more gas from China, not less: "It is quite inevitable that during this (industrialisation) stage, China's energy consumption and CO2 emissions will be quite high."

Last month, India likewise issued its National Action Plan on Climate Change, and also rejected Rudd-style cuts. The plan's authors, the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases. "It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of well being to its people." The plan's only real promise was in fact a threat: "India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries." Gee, thanks.

That, of course, means India won't stop its per capita emissions (now at 1.02 tonnes) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now 20 tonnes). Given it has one billion people, that's a promise to gas the world like it's never been gassed before. So is this our death warrant? Should this news have you seeing apocalyptic visions, too? Well, no. What makes the Indian report so interesting is that unlike our Ross Garnaut, who just accepted the word of those scientists wailing we faced doom, the Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why.

Their conclusion? They couldn't actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming: "No firm link between the documented (climate) changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established." In fact, they couldn't find much change in the climate at all. Yes, India's surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts and floods, or rain: "The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . ." It even dismissed the panic Al Gore helped to whip up about melting Himalayan glaciers: "While recession of some glaciers has occurred in some Himalayan regions in recent years, the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain. It is, accordingly, too early to establish long-term trends, or their causation, in respect of which there are several hypotheses."

Nor was that the only sign that India's Council on Climate Change had kept its cool while our Rudd and Garnaut lost theirs. For example, the Indians rightly insisted nuclear power had to be part of any real plan to cut emissions. Rudd and Garnaut won't even discuss it. The Indians also pointed out that no feasible technology to trap and bury the gasses of coal-fired power stations had yet been developed "and there are serious questions about the cost as well (as) permanence of the CO2 storage repositories".

Rudd and Garnaut, however, keep offering this dream to make us think our power stations can survive their emissions trading scheme, when state governments warn they may not. In every case the Indians are pragmatic where Rudd and Garnaut are having delusions -- delusions about an apocalypse, about cutting gases without going nuclear, about saving power stations they'll instead drive broke. And there's that delusion on which their whole plan is built -- that India and China will follow our sacrifice by cutting their throats, too. So psychiatrists are treating a 17-year-old tipped over the edge by global warming fear mongers? Pray that their next patients will be two men whose own delusions threaten to drive our whole economy over the edge as well.

Join Andrew on blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt
Copyright 2008, The Herald Sun

Another Flip Flop On Global Warming, Or A Healthy Dose Of Reality

The new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd just did a major flip-flop on his pledge to reduce "greenhouse gas" emissions as recommended by the United Nations and its IPCC. It seems someone explained the realities of life to Mr. Rudd and told him how much his plan would cost.

The same thing happens all the time, everywhere it seems. Someone comes up with an idea that looks good on paper, and everyone gets excited. Then they consider the price. Oops, maybe that is not such a good idea. Politicians are seem especially prone to his kind of stupid, irresponsible behavior. Expect to see more flip-flopping on the efforts to stop global warming and climate change as the true cost of such actions become more clear.
Peter

source:

Kevin Rudd recoils from climate change pledge
Peter Jean
December 07, 2007 12:00am
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd last night did an about-face on deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, days after Australia's delegation backed the plan at the climate talks in Bali.

A government representative at the talks this week said Australia backed a 25-40 per cent cut on 1990 emission levels by 2020. But after warnings it would lead to huge rises in electricity prices, Mr Rudd said the Government would not support the target.

The repudiation of the delegate's position represents the first stumble by the new Government's in its approach to climate change. Mr Rudd said he supported a longer-term greenhouse emissions cut of 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050. But the Government would not set medium-term targets until a report by economist Ross Garnaut was completed next year.
"I think speculation on individual numbers prior to that is not productive and I would suggest it would be better for all concerned if we waited for the outcome of that properly-deliberated document," Mr Rudd said.

The electricity industry yesterday warned it may not be able to meet growing consumer demand and comply with the 2020 target. Energy Supply Association of Australia chief executive Brad Page said a 17 per cent power price rise in Victoria would seem "pretty modest" compared with the cost of complying with the target. An ESAA report released this year found cutting carbon emissions by 30 per cent of 2000 levels by 2030 wold push up power costs by 30 per cent.

Mr Page said the cost of meeting the higher target by 2020 would be much more as low-cost, green-generation technology would not be available for more than 10 years.
"You are dependent on yet-to-be delivered technology," he said. "The community needs to be aware cuts of this magnitude will come at considerable cost and it's difficult to know how exactly it will be delivered." Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson said the suggested cuts would have "devastating impact" on Australia's economic development.
"It will have serious consequences for electricity bills and many other burdens borne by working families in day-to-day life, and pensioners," Dr Nelson said.

Greenpeace campaigner Steven Campbell said Australia should slash carbon emissions by 20 to 40 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020. "If we want to keep global warming below 2C then these are the targets we need," Mr Campbell said. A team of 212 climate change experts from more than 20 countries yesterday called for a 50 per cent cut in greenhouse pollution by 2050.