Carbon trading "a pyramid marketing scheme"

3 November, 2011 by

John Baird - climate sense

So says John Baird, Canadian Foreign Minister. Greg Sheridan writes in The Australian:

The Conservative government of which he is part, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, won an absolute majority for the first time at the last election on the platform of rejecting a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme.

Australian policy should pay a lot more attention to Canada, for no other economy is so similarly structured to ours. Baird is a good friend of Australia, feels warmly towards the Gillard government, and speaks glowingly of his friendship with Kevin Rudd. He explicitly did not criticise Australian policy. But the implications of his words are deadly.

The fact that both Canada and the US have rejected a carbon tax or ETS, and that China, India and Indonesia equally will never go down such a road, means there is no prospect of global action on climate change anything like that which Australia is taking. Baird believes that neither Canada nor the US will ever implement a carbon tax or an ETS.

But it is his judgment on the international carbon trading system that is most devastating for the Gillard government’s approach. I asked Baird whether Canada would ever join an international carbon trade. He replied: “There’s nothing to join. Where is it going on today?”

More generally, on carbon trading he said: “One of the problems I have with that (approach) is that everyone just lines up to get credit. My province has a lot of trees, where do we get credit for that? We had an enhanced oil recovery project that pumps carbon into oil wells to get an additional 15 per cent of oil out of them and we had a pipeline importing carbon from the US. So they wanted to get credit for sequestration.

“I said to them ‘You’re not even doing it in our country.’ They said ‘We’re doing something good, we want the credits.’

“(Carbon trading) is like a pyramid marketing scheme. You don’t have to actually sell the dog food, you just have to get 10 of your friends to do it and you’ll get royalties.”

Sheridan’s conclusion is spot on:

“the international trading scheme [in GHGs] lies halfway between a fantasy and a fraud and is never going to make a serious contribution to diminishing greenhouse gases.”

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Muller flip-flops on scepticism

3 November, 2011 by

PR disaster?

He who lives by the media spin cycle dies by the media spin cycle. Just over a week ago, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Muller of BEST claimed that you couldn’t possibly be sceptical of global warming alarmism any more (see here), thanks to his temperature data set showing that the planet had indeed warmed – knock me down with a feather.

But now, in a new interview, he’s back-pedalling fast, as Tom Nelson reports:

Around the 2:45 mark of Part 1, referring to his recent Wall Street Journal article, Muller says “I never said you shouldn’t be a skeptic. I never said that.”

From his article:

Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.

Just before the 5-minute mark, Muller is asked if he’s in the Al Gore camp. Muller: “Al Gore camp? That’s ridiculous…what I point out is that most of what appears in An Inconvenient Truth is absolutely either wrong, exaggerated, or misleading.”

At the 8:45 mark, he says scientists will “endorse Al Gore, even though they know what he’s saying is exaggerated and misleading. He’ll talk about polar bears dying even though we know they’re not dying…”.

In Part 2, he’s asked about Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post piece.

[Q] It says “What Dr Muller says proves that the skeptics are wrong and they’ve got to get on the cap and trade train”.

Muller: “That’s ridiculous. I mean, some people say I proved that there was no ClimateGate. No. NO! The ClimateGate thing was a scandal. It’s terrible what they did. It’s shameful the way they hid the data.”

Muller is trying very hard to have a foot in both camps, but it’s getting harder and harder to maintain.

Richard Muller interview, Part 1 – YouTube

Richard Muller interview, Part 2 – YouTube

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Biofuel obsession wrecks African communities

2 November, 2011 by

Communities wrecked

Biofuels – just the latest in the long line of green mirages, which, like all the others, disappears the closer you inspect it. Driven by the madness of climate change zealots who are hectoring and badgering us to abandon cheap coal and oil to “save the planet”, biofuels succeed in only two things – depriving already poor communities of their livelihoods and the world of its precious food resources.

As The Guardian reports:

“The collapse of Sun Biofuels has left hundreds of Tanzanians landless, jobless, and in despair for the future

People feel this is like the return of colonialism,” says Athumani Mkambala, chairman of Mhaga village in rural Tanzania. “Colonialism in the form of investment.”

A quarter of the village’s land in Kisarawe district was acquired by a British biofuels company in 2008, with the promise of financial compensation, 700 jobs, water wells, improved schools, health clinics and roads. But the company has gone bust, leaving villagers not just jobless but landless as well. The same story is playing out across Africa, as foreign investors buy up land but leave some of the poorest people on Earth worse off when their plans fail.

The tale of London-based Sun Biofuels’s misadventure in Kisarawe links the broken hopes of the villagers to offshore tax havens and mysterious new owners, tracked down by the Observer, and ultimately to petrol pumps in the UK and across Europe. The final link results from the mandatory blending of biofuels into European petrol and diesel. The aim is to reduce carbon emissions, but many say biofuels actually increase pollution. The G20 meeting next week will discuss the issue, following a stark report it received in June from the World Bank, World Trade Organisation, UN and others calling for biofuels subsidies to be abandoned.

“The situation in Kisarawe is heartbreaking, but the real tragedy is that it is far from unique. Communities across Africa and beyond are losing their land as a result of the massive biofuel targets set by our government,” said Josie Cohen at development group ActionAid, which works in Kisarawe. “Like it or not, everyone who drives a car or catches a bus is involved in this problem, as all UK petrol and diesel is mixed with biofuels.”

Utterly scandalous, but just par for the course in this wonderful new “green economy”.

Read it here.

(h/t: CL-F)

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

MUST READ: Matt Ridley on scientific heresy

2 November, 2011 by

Brilliant stuff – read it all. From Bishop Hill.

Filed Under: Climate

UK: Green subsidies slashed

2 November, 2011 by

Fake green jobs

You see? Julia and Greg are right – the rest of the world is “rushing ahead” and Australia will be left behind [sarc off].

So just as Australia is careering headlong into a pointless carbon taxation regime, the government of the UK is waking up to the grim reality of the non-existent “green economy” and cutting solar subsidies. “25,000 green jobs cut” they shriek, but it probably means three times that many real jobs saved:

Hundreds of solar companies are likely to go bust by Christmas after the Department for Energy and Climate Change confirmed it is looking to halve subsidies for new panels.

Greg Barker, minister for climate change, said the “feed-in tariff” subsidies are currently too generous, because the cost of installing solar panels has fallen.

The proposed cuts, due to come into force from December, will see the amount earned from each panel fall from 43.3p per kilowatt hour of solar power to 21p. This will save energy customers around £23 a year – or £700m in total – because the subsidies are funded through electricity bills. (source)

More at WUWT.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

OT: The disintegration of Europe

1 November, 2011 by

Greece bombs the Euro (with apologies to Stanley Kubrick)

It has been an extraordinary sight, the slow descent of Europe into disarray as the dream of integration and further unity fades. Despite the European bureaucrats insisting they need more and more integration to rescue the dire predicament, the unfortunate reality is that such integration is actually tearing Europe apart.

The European experiment has failed dismally (as many knew it would), but the failure is particularly evident in the single currency. My home country was sensible enough to stay out of the Euro zone, and it is now becoming obvious that out of the Euro zone is by far the best place to be. Now the Greek Prime Minister has dropped a proverbial bombshell.

For anyone interested, two blogs stand out as providing unparalleled commentary on the unfolding events. Firstly, Autonomous Mind:

No one saw this coming. As the EU’s elite congratulated themselves on announcing their unfunded €1 trillion voodoo financial package, to shore up Greece and thus keep the Eurozone intact for a while longer, Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, was preparing to ask the Greek people if they accept the terms of the deal in a national referendum.

Moves are already afoot in Greece to declare such a referendum unconstitutional.  The political class dare not ask the people what they want.  It is not the EU way.  The Greeks will almost certainly reject the deal, seeing it as an element of the austerity measures that have resulted in strikes and civil disorder.  That will mean a default on their already huge debt, and crucially, despite all the EU’s assurances to the contrary, the likely departure of Greece from the Euro. (source)

Secondly, Richard North’s EU Referendum:

Fotis Kouvelis, leader of the small Democratic Left party argues that, instead of a referendum, the country must go to early elections. It’s the most honourable solution, he says. But with no party likely to win a clear lead, Papandreou might be gambling on the referendum giving him a new legitimacy, which will extend beyond the January and well into the next year.

But there is one issue – perhaps the elephant in the room – which is not being mentioned: the attitude of the Army. With a possibility of a military coup not being ruled out, we do not know who is pulling the strings. 

For one brief moment though, we have a delicious certainty of knowing who isn’t. And even now, such has been the shock that we have not yet had a comment from either Berlin or Brussels. (source)

Many are predicting dark days ahead for Europe.

Filed Under: Climate

Freaks of Nature: The amazing "AGW bird"

1 November, 2011 by

Research cost peanuts…

It grows, and it shrinks, at the same time! From Junk Science:

A myth that lasted a month.

Last month we spotlighted a study that claimed global warming would shrink animals by causing them to grow faster and stop growing sooner, leaving them smaller.

Scarcely 30 days later, however, San Francisco State University researchers report that global warming is making birds get bigger.

Here’s the media release.

An each way bet, just like everything else in the climate scare machine.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,
«Previous Page