A policy to hurt Australia

FROM- Quadrant On Line

by Cory Bernardi

Just for a moment, suspend any semblance of critical thought and accept the cataclysmic version of anthropogenic climate change advanced by the likes of Penny Wong, Tim Flannery and Al Gore.

Ignore too, the tens of thousands of scientists who disagree with the political agenda of the IPCC and just accept the claims of those who have made increasingly alarmist predictions, yet have been proved wrong time and time again.

As you lie awake at night worried by the mere thought of ocean front land in Wagga Wagga, you realise that something needs to be done before it is too late. Australia needs to act now and introduce an emissions trading scheme because climate change is "the greatest moral issue of our time."

As an acquiescent disciple of the new religion, to save the planet you concoct a scheme that will tax every business and every family in the country. Sure, it will raise the cost of food, electricity, construction and transport but that is a price you are prepared for others to pay. You condemn any opponents of your plan as sceptics and heretics, while trying to convince the community that it won't hurt them too much.

In fact, so desperate are you to facilitate the introduction of your multi-billion dollar wealth redistribution system, that you promise to compensate some of those affected by more than it is going to cost them. Surely everyone can see the sense in taking from the wealthy and giving to those who pollute just as much but aren't as well off. Just think of it as spreading the socialist love to save the planet.

Despite the rejection of your scheme by farmers and environmentalists, businesses and families, you plough on regardless. What does it matter if hundreds of thousands of jobs are going to be lost and industries closed if it means we will have less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Desperately looking for support, you enlist those notorious polluters in the investment banking, legal and financial markets to support your cause, conveniently forgetting only months ago you were blaming their excessive culture of greed for the failure of the world financial system. Ignore too, the billions of dollars they stand to make from the creation and administration of the unwieldy bureaucracy and carbon trading scheme you propose. Surely the opportunity to profit wouldn't be the reason they endorse your scheme, would it?

Such is the urgency of the matter at hand, you insist that the Parliament pass your legislation immediately, even though your new scheme won't actually commence for a couple of years. Worse still, you acknowledge that your scheme won't actually make any difference to the climate unless the rest of the world does something similar.

Of course the rest of the world won't be making up their minds for a few months yet. Undeterred, you make the 'decisive and tough' decision to act now, even though you know you are damaging the economic future of your own country.

Now back to reality.

Under any critical analysis, the above scenario would be considered the height of political madness, yet that is exactly what the advocates of Labor’s dishonestly named Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) want to do.

Even the most devout anthropogenic climate change believer knows that Australia acting alone to reduce carbon emissions will not make a jot of difference to the climate. They also know that Australian industry and jobs will disappear overseas in the absence of a truly global agreement.

Under Labor's CPRS, prices for everyday goods will rise and every power point will be come a tax collection outlet for a rapacious Government with an insatiable appetite for interfering in our lives. Worse still, acting ahead of the rest of the world might actually mean that Australia is stuck with a scheme that won't make any difference except to damage our domestic economy.

It's time for a reality check of the political action attached to the climate change debate.

Labor's CPRS is so flawed that it should not be reintroduced into the Parliament until after the global climate change talks in Copenhagen later this year. To pass this Bill, or any incarnation of it ahead of the Copenhagen talks, is sheer folly. To do so, when Labor’s scheme is not even scheduled to commence until 2011, would suggest that politics and politicians have taken leave of their senses.

Any talk of accepting, amending, improving or adapting Labor’s scheme before then is to ignore our national interest.


Cory Bernardi Liberal Senator for South Australia
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By the numbers ye shall know them

FROM- Tulane Hullabaloo
Understanding global warming

The fallacies of Gore and the data of NASA prove questionable

Several months ago, syndicated radio host Dennis Prager accurately described the three conditions that must hold for global warming theorists to be correct.

Number one: The Earth must be warming. Number two: Increasing man-made carbon dioxide emissions are causing the warming trend. And number three: Global warming will be destructive.

There is certainly scientific consensus that man-made carbon dioxide emissions have increased every year during the last decade. But there is no scientific consensus that those emissions have driven temperature upwards.

In one fell swoop, the first two conditions for global warming can be all but thrown out. Since Al Gore released his well-known movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Earth has cooled by approximately one-third of a degree.

In that same time, man-made carbon dioxide emissions have increased. That means that since Gore’s movie, there has actually been a negative correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature, which pokes a hole in his graph that link carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.

Gore also falsely inferred that correlation means causation. He showed that there is a correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide emissions and assumed that the correlation means that one force is causing the other. In the last century, however, along with increasing temperatures, there has also been an increase in the amount of cell phones. Correlation? Yes. Causation? I hope not.

Unfortunately, Gore is not the only person who has published dubious data regarding global warming. Late last year, NASA published a report claiming that November 2008 was the warmest November in recorded history. Skeptical scientists immediately challenged NASA’s data, and NASA came out and apologized, claiming that they accidentally copied the October 2008 temperatures recorded in Russia.

NASA, which is oft-quoted by global warming advocates, has been adding 0.15 degrees Celsius to its U.S. temperature reports since 2000, according to well-known global warming skeptic and statistician Steve McIntyre. According to McIntyre, NASA claimed that the year 2006 was the warmest in recorded history. Well, close, sort of. It was actually the fourth warmest. Number one was 1934, when carbon dioxide emissions were nowhere near today’s levels. In fact, only four of the 11 warmest recorded years have occurred in the last 54 years.

That much of the world and many of our leaders have drunk the global warming Kool-Aid is a testament to the fact that humans generally believe what they want to believe. The left wants to believe that global warming is true because it gives them an excuse to control our lives.

After all, if your “carbon footprint” is destroying Earth, then the government should have the authority to make coal, electricity and gasoline extremely expensive. It’s remarkable that on the one hand, the left wants America to give massive amounts of aid to starving Africans. But on the other hand, the left also wants to subsidize ethanol, which drives up the global prices of corn, milk, meat and eggs. Higher staple food prices are far harder for Africans than for Americans.
I can continue rattling off statistics that cast doubt upon the idea of global warming. I can continue describing unforeseen consequences (higher food prices, rapid deforestation, etc) that have developed as a result of policies that address global warming. But the bottom line is that dogma permeates all levels of this debate, and people currently entrenched in their opinions are likely to remain there.

What those people don’t realize is that every action people take has complex, far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences. Forcibly raising the prices of energy — the lifeblood of every economy — would have many unforeseen and disastrous consequences. But, as usual, the left does not understand the world’s complexity. The left thinks that human actions have predictable, foreseeable consequences.

As author Stephen Covery said, “While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.”



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