The government’s carbon tax proposal gets more convoluted by the day.
THE paranoia over carbon dioxide gas, an essential nutrient for all plant life and thus humanity, being demonstrated by the Gillard government and the Greens becomes ever more outrageous.
Thankfully, voters sense that they’re being taken for a costly ride to disaster.
Rod Bates of Ardross is thus commended for writing a letter with which State Scene wholeheartedly agrees, carried in The Australian (March 22), which reads: “Proponents of a carbon tax seem to have come up with the ultimate Magic Pudding.
“Revenue from the carbon tax is going to give tax cuts to low and middle income earners and compensate pensioners and welfare recipients.
“It will pay farmers to plant trees, compensate industry and ensure no coal mining jobs are lost.
“Australia is also a leading light in a UN committee setting up a fund to raise $100 billion a year to help Third World countries reduce emissions, just another pipeline to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
“Norman Lindsay’s book has two pudding thieves, Possum and Wombat.
“The pudding thief in this fantasy will be the bureaucracy which will administer the tax and eat up most of the pudding before it’s out of the oven.”
Spot on, it’s definitely a Magic Pudding that’s on the Gillard-Greens policy menu.
How do the prime minister and her Greens partners justify this? Answer: By claiming the planet is heating when it’s not.
Let’s therefore inquire by how much will the baking of a Magic Pudding slash global temperatures?
Melbourne columnist, Andrew Bolt, recently sought the answer to this very elementary question from two Magic Pudding proponents, both of whom, of course, are recipients of taxpayers’ money.
First quizzed was Tim Flannery, hired by the Gillard-Greens team at a rate of $300,000 annually as climate change commissioner to proselytise the global heating message.
Bolt: How much will it cost to cut our emissions by the government’s target of 5 per cent by 2020 and how much will world temperatures fall by as a consequence?
Flannery: ... In terms of how much it will cut temperatures, that really very much depends upon how Australia’s position is seen overseas.
Bolt: No, no, we’ll get onto that, Tim. On our own, cutting our emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, what will that lower the world’s temperatures by?
Flannery: See, that’s a bogus question because nothing is in isolation.
Bolt: Everyone understands that that is the argument. But we’re just trying to get basic facts, without worrying about the consequences – about what those facts may lead people to think. On our own, by cutting our emissions ... what will the world’s temperatures fall by as a consequence?
Flannery: Look, it will be a very, very small increment.
Bolt: Can you give us a rough figure?
Flannery: Sorry, I can’t because it’s a very complex system and we’re dealing with probabilities here.
Bolt: Are you talking about a thousandth of a degree? A hundredth of a degree? What sort of rough figure?
Flannery: Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as 1,000 years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed ...
With similar questioning, Bolt fronted John Daley of Melbourne’s Grattan Institute, a taxpayer-funded entity promoting the global heating cause.
Professor Daley claimed Australia had already wasted $6 billion on countering global heating with schemes that had done next to nothing to slash CO2 emissions.
Bolt: To get to Julia Gillard’s target of cutting emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, how many more of these billions would we need to have spent?
Daley: If you’re going to do the whole lot through rebate schemes, you’d have to spend in the order of about $300 billion. (Emissions trading) is a much more efficient way to go.
Bolt: By how much will the world’s temperatures fall if we go to this emissions trading scheme that Julia Gillard recommends?
Daley: Well, it of course depends on what other countries in the world ...
Bolt: No, no, just ours, John. I’m just looking at us. Us alone.
Daley: This is a classic collective action problem. If every country in the world looks at how much will their reductions make a difference, the answer for any individual country, even for the US, even for China, is not that much.
Bolt: What I’m trying to do is just get to the bottom-line facts: if we spend these umpteen billions on cutting emissions further, to the 5 per cent by 2020, how much will Australia’s action alone cut the world’s temperature by? That must be measured somewhere ...
Daley: Well, I think it’s not been measured anywhere because it’s not seen as being the right way to think about this.
So, if Australians have placed on their tables the Gillard-Greens Magic Pudding one professor claimed the temperature slide by 2020 “will be a very, very small increment”, while another said “not that much”.
That means that to get “a very, very small increment”, which Professor Flannery wouldn’t quantify, and “not that much” that Professor Daley also wouldn’t quantify, we’re told we must endure taxing that will boost the cost of all food due to higher planting, harvesting, transport and refrigeration costs.
And that’s just the beginning.
Don’t forget home and workplace heating, air-conditioning, lighting, clothes ironing, entertainment, internet access, shire rate rises since street lighting costs will rise, and so on.
All that for what drop in temperature? Bolt couldn’t extract a figure.
To thus say we’re on a road to utter madness is being kind.
Or to quote Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace founder, who finally fled that global campaigning entity: “Greenpeace became increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that is anti-science, anti-business, and downright anti-human.”
But it’s Greenpeace-style thinking that now prevails in Canberra.
Now, if two of the top three Gillard-Greens government’s advisers couldn’t answer Bolt’s simple question – “how much will world temperatures fall by as a consequence when CO2 is taxed” – wouldn’t it perhaps be smart for government to go out and find the answer?
Under Gillard-Greens Greenpeace-style ideological thinking, no way.
They’re just going to plough on irrespective of damage to the economy for no gain whatsoever in lowering temperatures, which, as State Scene has stressed for years, isn’t rising.
Little wonder the third Gillard-Greens government’s well-paid adviser, Ross Garnaut, has been very directly and publicly challenged by someone with his feet firmly on the ground.
Brent Gunter, manager of InterGen, which supplies 16 per cent of Queensland’s electricity market, has called on Professor Garnaut to drop his “undergraduate rhetorical devices” and develop instead “real world” policies about power generation that don’t risk its provision.
Things are getting really bad when members of a country’s professorial class are being publicly told to drop resorting to “undergraduate rhetorical devices”.
So far this year there has been a lot of professing by professors with precious little cognisance of the “real world” by them and their Greenpeace-style political paymasters.
