Just don't tell me the debate's over…
Union man…
Greg Combet has been handed the hospital pass of selling a price on carbon to an increasingly sceptical Australian public. A former union boss, he’s Labor through and through.
We wait with bated breath for the Com-bot’s first pronouncement on climate. My guess is that we won’t have to wait long, and it will be as nonsensical as all of Penny’s…
Freaking useless, and expensive
The UK is way ahead of Australia in the climate madness stakes, having already enacted crippling legislation that will hamstring its energy policy by requiring 15% of its energy to be generated from “green” [i.e. useless] sources by 2020, and committing itself to a massive 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. But unfortunately, not everyone wants ugly wind farms in their back yards, and the planning system is grinding to a halt:
The planning system must allow more wind farms or Britain will fail to meet key climate change targets, Government advisers have warned.
The UK is committed to generating 15 per cent of energy from green sources like wind and solar by 2020.
But at the moment only 3 per cent of energy comes from renewables. [Only 12% to go in less than a decade – good luck with that!]
Lord Adair Turner, Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), said the UK is likely to miss the target unless there is massive investment in wind, wave and solar.
In a strongly-worded letter to Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Minister, he called for the Government to “ramp up” efforts to build turbines both on land and at sea.
He said the average wind farm is stuck for more than three years in the planning system. In the last year planning approval rates fell from 68 per cent to 53 per cent.
Despite concerns about wind farms in beauty spots, he said planning permission needs to be given faster so that three times as many turbines can be installed every year. (source)
I guess common-sense will eventually prevail at some point, when the utter lunacy of all this is too obvious to ignore, but how supposedly intelligent people can be so freaking dumb is quite frankly staggering.
Until that happens, however, it’s a case of “Adios”, Great Britain.
(h/t EU Referendum)
Fantastic stuff from the colourful Ryanair chief, Michael O’Leary (with a few of the asterisks filled in):
His latest comments, in which he said the idea man-made pollution is heating up the planet is “horse shit”, have struck a sour note with environmental campaigners – something which is unlikely to unduly trouble O’Leary.
He said in an interview with The Independent: “We’ve had an ice age. We’ve also had a couple of very hot spells during the Middle Ages, so nobody can deny climate change.
“But there’s absolutely no link between man-made carbon, which contributes less than two per cent of total Carbon Emissions [and climate change].”
He added: “The scientific community has nearly always been wrong in history anyway. In the Middle Ages, they were going to excommunicate Galileo because the entire scientific community said the Earth was flat.
“I mean, it is absolutely bizarre that the people who can’t tell us what the f***ing weather is next Tuesday can predict with absolute precision what the f***ing global temperatures will be in 100 years’ time. It’s horse shit.”
Brilliant stuff. If you follow The Independent link, however, you will see a piss-weak attempt at rebuttal of his simple, but valid, points (essential because The Indescribablyboring has already made up its mind on climate change) which is littered with the usual IPCC apologist nonsense and caveats by the bucket load.
Top of the mornin’ to yer, Michael!
Read it here.
"I've had it up to here!"
How will I survive without Penny, whose mechanical delivery earned her the moniker “the Wong-bot” in these pages? She’s provided so much material for this blog since October 2008… But she’s had enough:
PRIME Minister Julia Gillard is expected to bring high-flyer Greg Combet into cabinet to be climate minister, as Labor tries to rebuild credibility on an issue that helped sow the seeds of its poor performance at the federal election last month.
Mr Combet, the former ACTU chief who assisted in the climate portfolio during his first term in Parliament, is seen as one of the government’s best trouble shooters, most recently in his handling of the mop-up after the home insulation debacle.
His big challenge as climate minister would be to help win acceptance for a carbon price after Labor’s failed efforts to get an emissions trading scheme passed through Parliament during its first term.
Penny Wong, the minister who oversaw the ETS process and then had the difficult task of selling Ms Gillard’s unpopular plan for a citizens assembly on climate change, is believed to want a change of portfolio. (source)
OK, Com-bot – it’s your turn next!
Imbecilic
Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, the two witless and gutless independents that handed power to Julia Gillard earlier this week, betrayed their electorates by siding with Labor, as John Styles explains in The Spectator:
When you enjoy the sound of your own voice as much as the giggling, grinning Rob Oakeshott apparently does, there is always a chance you will say more than you may have intended. So it was during the Independent/maybe-Labor minister’s media conference on Tuesday at which he and Tony Windsor delivered federal government to the Labor-Greens alliance.
‘We’ve just had to go through an incredibly unnatural decision to draw some conclusions about lining up with a party that fundamentally we don’t believe with [sic],’ he said, during a typically long, rambling response to a journalist’s question about how the pair of independents could make a decision that was so comprehensively out of step with the conservative nature of their electorates.
Here was Oakeshott admitting that he was giving crucial support to a party he didn’t believe in. He described his decision as ‘unnatural’. How about bizarre, weird, crazy? How about calling it just plain nuts?
So we had the representative of a demonstrably conservative constituency, a seat that overwhelmingly supported the Coalition in its Senate vote and expressed a decided preference for a Coalition government in post-election opinion polling, siding with the Labor party and radical Left Greens. More than that, the decision defied the clear preference of the nation as a whole. On 21 August, the Coalition won the primary vote, the two-party-preferred vote and won the most seats in the House of Representatives.
In Rob Oakeshott’s Lyne electorate, the ALP managed to attract only 13.5 per cent of the primary vote and the Greens just 4.3 per cent. In Tony Windsor’s seat, the Left fared even worse: Country Labor 8.1 per cent, the Greens 3.6 per cent.
Former Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger summed it up on Melbourne radio MTR 1377:
‘If [Oakeshott] had gone to that election saying that, if the opportunity arose, I am going to accept the position of a minister in a government led by a Socialist Left prime minister — let’s not forget, Julia Gillard has been in the Socialist Left faction of the Labor party for almost 30 years — I’m going to be a minister of a government which is supported by the extreme Left Greens, Andrew Wilkie from Tasmania and another former National, you know, people would have been aghast.
‘He wouldn’t have got close to being elected. And if he accepts a ministry in a Labor government supported by the Greens … the people in his electorate would have every right to be absolutely feral at him, and so they should be.’
Read it all – and weep.
The nightmare continues...
Thanks to Labor, the hysterical eco-loony Greens and the witless independents, a price on carbon is virtually guaranteed, and probably within the lifetime of this parliament. All we can hope is that its life is so brief the moonbats won’t have a chance to do irreparable damage to our economy and our country. As the ABC reports:
Greens MP Adam Bandt and the independents who threw their lot in with Labor have made it clear they would like to see the Federal Government take action to address climate change.
In its negotiations to form government, Labor agreed to convene a climate change committee made up of MPs and experts [but no sceptics, of course, or anyone that could possibly cast doubt on the AGW hysteria propounded by the IPCC] that would work towards putting a price on carbon.
The Climate Institute says it is hopeful the new Government will act more promptly and decisively than the previous Labor government, but a mining industry body says it is reserving judgment.
The independents who sided with Labor and Mr Bandt made it clear shortly after polling day that they want something done about climate change. [Just like that! Easy! As if Australia legislating an ETS will make one iota of difference to the climate! It’s simply laughable.]
“I support the precautionary principle and whether it applies to a market or not, or is carbon tax or whatever else, but if the climate scientists are in fact right and we do nothing, what have we done to future generations?” independent MP Tony Windsor said. [Yep, Windsor thinks that spending trillions of dollars to solve a non-problem is better than spending it on hospitals or schools. A bit like the NBN really…]
…
John Connor from the Climate Institute says it is a big step forward. [Backward.]
“I think it is very possible that we will get a price tag and limit on pollution here in Australia in the next couple of years,” he said.
“I think it is in everyone’s interest if we get on with that and do that as early as we can in this Parliament so people can understand the world won’t end, and in fact opportunities will arise and come as a consequence of that action.” [In the fairy-tale land you inhabit, perhaps, but not in the real world.]
Mr Connor says the election outcome should serve as a warning to Labor and the Coalition that the electorate wants action. (source)
Which is utter nonsense. People voted Green as a protest against the incompetence of Labor – nothing to do with crippling our economy with a pointless ETS or carbon tax.
Gillard on the 7.30 Report
As we would expect, the climate change “committee” that Julia Gillard will set up in agreement with the Greens will be stacked with warmists, and there won’t be a sceptic within 20 miles. From the ABC’s 7.30 Report last night (thanks to Laurie W for the link):
KERRY O’BRIEN: OK. If we can look at your early priorities in this Gillard Government. Climate change has had a very chequered career within Labor’s first term, and even during the campaign. When your climate change committee that you’ve agreed to with the Greens has been set up – which it will be done as – I think by late this month – what timeframe would you want to see for that committee? And are you committed to seeing legislation come into the Parliament within this term of office?
JULIA GILLARD: Well, in the spirit of including people, Kerry, it’s not for me to dictate. But what I would like to see from that committee is that we can genuinely include, across the Parliament, people who believe climate change is real and who believe we will only reduce carbon pollution and meet our 2020 targets if we price carbon. And then with all of those people in the room, we’d work through to look for the points of agreement. (source)
Just read that sentence again: The committee will be formed from “people who believe climate change is real and who believe we will only reduce carbon pollution and meet our 2020 targets if we price carbon.” So what on earth is the point of this committee other than to rubber stamp a decision already made?
You can already detect the stench of Green influence on this government, and it will only get more putrid…
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I’m excluding Bob Katter, because, maverick that he is, he did at least support the Coalition (as his electorate would expect him to). The other two wet weekends were blinded by climate change and broadband, the two biggest non-issues of the election, and thereby hand power to Gillard. And did you hear Oakeshott’s self-indulgent speech? What a joke! Even the journos couldn’t stand it – they were groaning in the background. And it doesn’t take long for the real agenda to come out:
When asked by a journalist why he didn’t back the Coalition, Tony Windsor admitted with a grin, “because they’d be more likely to win if they did go back to the polls”.
When asked how he could back a government that’s less likely to win, Windsor stated that they’d “be more likely to be here a longer time if they can’t go to the polls and win in a hurry”, with Oakeshot interjecting, “They’ve got more to lose”.
In other words, Oakeshot and Windsor admit they are defying what the nation (including their own conservative electorates) and propping up one of the most incompetent and unstable governments in Australia’s history, which has been massively repudiated by voters, has suffered a savage swing – in seats, first and second preference votes and its legitimacy – in order to preserve their power for as long as possible. (source)
So, fellow Australians, we can look forward to a rag-bag coalition, the Greens on the levers of power, an NBN cock-up to rival or exceed the BER cock-up or the pink batts cock-up, importantly for this blog, an emissions trading scheme or a carbon tax, a mining tax, and god alone knows what other disastrous policies for this country. Good luck, Australia.
Australian Climate Madness 
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