Economic growth, which really means better standards of living, better education, better healthcare, better services, is a “cancer”, according to a new senator who is clearly “green” in more ways than one. Inevitably, he blames all the country’s ills on our reliance on fossil fuels:

He said future historians would come to this period as the “beginning of the oil endgame”. “The age in which Australia sleepwalked along behind a tiny handful of powerful nations armed with nuclear weapons into a disastrous occupation of Iraq, with the singular objective of cornering the world’s shrinking reserves of cheap oil. China’s behaviour in Burma and Sudan, and Russian aggression in Georgia, flow from this same terrible imperative,” Senator Ludlam said during his speech two weeks ago.

I think he should have stuck to graphic design.

Read it here.

(…before we get found out, that is)

The UK Met Office, for whom I used to have great respect, is now spouting alarmist propaganda on a daily basis, and the Guardian newspaper is happy to report it (and our very own Herald is happy to repeat it).

THE world will have to take drastic action within two years to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution if it is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a new British study warns.

Sorry to be pedantic, but CO2 is not pollution…

A leading adviser at the Met Office, Vicky Pope, warned that failure by governments to agree to “large and early” cuts or to meet those targets “could have significant consequences”.

Read it here.

A great read!

“Idiotic comment of the day” gong is awarded to Victorian premier John Brumby, who made his ignorance of climate matters patently obvious in the following sound bite from COAG:

In this era of climate change, one thing we can be sure about is that we’re going to see … more climatic events, which create emergency situations, so whether it’s thunderstorms, whether it’s bushfires, whether it’s wind events.

Two points, John: (1) this era is no different from any other era: climate change happens – get used to it; and, (2) there is no evidence to link warming with increased “climatic” events [he means “weather” events, of course, and bushfires aren’t exactly weather events either, they’re often caused by lightning, which is a weather event – oh dear, it’s so confusing…], but hey, who cares about the facts? As long as it makes a good headline and gets the Victorian government more dollars.

As for wind events, I reckon he’s on about farting cattle again…

Read it here.

As you can imagine, Ross Garnaut’s barmy idea that we should all eat kangaroo has gone down like a roo sausage at a Skippy convention with the farming and rural communities, where it has been branded a “sick joke”. Farm Online suggests Garnaut may have “a few roos loose in the top paddock”!

Read it here.

Well done Miranda for getting this published in the Sydney Moonbat Herald! Garnaut’s idea of eating kangaroo didn’t go down too well with her (and probably with many, many others):

I don’t want to eat kangaroo. Ever. It’s dark, chewy, gamey and smelly. But, says Ross Garnaut, the Government’s economics guru on climate change, kangaroo is what we will all have to eat in a few years. Beef and lamb will be reserved only for the very wealthy in the brave new future he envisages, in which Australia leads the world on tackling climate change.

And again, she skewers the main plank of Garnaut’s report:

The argument is “similar to advising a man with a gangrenous leg that paying $50,000 for an aspirin is a good deal because the cost compares favourably to the cost of inaction, which is losing the leg,” Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, wrote last month. “Of course, the aspirin doesn’t prevent that outcome.”

Read the rest here.

Another great article which cuts through the AGW BS. Piers Ackerman in the Daily Telegraph hits the nail squarely on the head:

The problems for Professor Garnaut and the global warming cultists is that their claims are wild suppositions at best. The tables in the last report he issued clearly demonstrated that he, Rudd, and Labor’s assorted climate change and environmental ministers like Senator Penny Wong and Peter Garrett, are wrong when they state unequivocally that the cost of doing nothing would be greater than the cost of doing something.

And what I have said all along:

Garnaut, Rudd, Wong and Garrett must back their catastrophic forecasts with irrefutable evidence before hastening the nation further down this path to disaster.

Read the rest here.

Barry Brook is the “Sir Hubert Wilkins professor of climate change and director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide” – has there ever been a more transparent case of vested interests than that? His entire career wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the AGW swindle!

So, with that out of the way, it’s little surprise he’s investing in his own future by stoking up the alarmist cause in an Opinion piece on News.com.au, and talking about Australia converting to a carbon-free economy based on renewables, like wind and solar (both of which are hugely expensive and very unreliable).

In the next 50 years, humanity will either go to hell in a hand basket, or it will totally revamp the way it does business. If it takes the bleak “do as little as possible, slowly” pathway, interior Australia may see a tide of climate refugees fleeing flooded coastlines, a destroyed national food bowl, a devastated tourism industry, and huge dislocation.

He then makes the hilarious comparison between the oil fields of the Middle East and “our huge unexploited solar resources”, as if we could trade sunbeams on the world market! Efficient solar energy is a long way away – solar cells are fragile, expensive and inefficient. As for wind power, it is unreliable, expensive and wind farms are a blight on the landscape.

Read the rest here.

You can’t make this stuff up. Our bonkers cousins across the ditch are already taxing methane emissions from farm animals, and the Sydney Moonbat Herald suggests that Australia does the same, and that we should all eat kangaroo instead (because they, apparently, have better manners and do not fart in public).

Here the SMH presents their vision of the utopian carbon-free Australia of the future – we’re all driving electric cars, and catching trains to Perth – it’s so ridiculous to be laughable. Sheep and cattle farming is tightly bound up with Australian culture and history, and yet the SMH dismisses it with a stroke of a pen in pursuit of pointless emissions reductions.

Read it and weep.

Kevin Rudd has dismissed claims that the global economic crisis might be a teensy weensy bit more urgent than nebulous climate change action, and is set to make you and me and every other Australian pay more for their energy to achieve absolutely nothing (other than make a hopeless political gesture).

One glimmer of hope in the darkness is that Andrew Robb, the Opposition spokesman on emissions trading, has said what no-one else seems to realise:

“Professor Garnaut is saying that Australia by itself can make no impact on global climate change, that climate change is a global problem requiring a global solution.”

He accused the Government of rushing the finalisation of an emissions trading scheme “for purely political reasons.”

Yep, dead right. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry also comment sensibly that Garnaut’s work had:

“two critical missing links — the absence of robust economic modelling and the absence of global emissions trading agreements”.

Read the rest here.