ACM retrospective: a look back at six years of climate madness

The climate bureaucracy is reduced to rubble

This blog started in September 2008, when we were one year into the Kevin Rudd Labor government. It was Labor policy to introduce an emissions trading scheme (ETS), and as we approached the end of 2009, Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull was indicating that he would give it bipartisan support.

But Coalition backbenchers were stirring, as ACM reported on 20 October 2009:

Now is the time for all good men (and women) to come to the aid of the Party – in this case, the Liberal party. The backbenchers need to stand up for their principles and not be steamrollered by their worryingly green-tinged leader:

MALCOLM Turnbull is on a collision course with his own back bench after staking his leadership on a demand that they back his climate change strategy.Several MPs immediately refused to do so.If the partyroom refused to back his strategy of negotiating amendments to the government’s emissions trading scheme, Mr Turnbull said yesterday, the Coalition would “literally be a party with nothing to say … a party with no ideas”, and that was “not the party I am prepared to lead”.

Throwing down the gauntlet to his internal critics, Mr Turnbull said: “I am asserting my authority as the leader of the Liberal Party and the Leader of the Opposition.”

“If the partyroom were to reject my recommendation to them, that would obviously be a leadership issue. That’s perfectly plain, perfectly clear,” he told ABC Radio in Adelaide.

By 20 November, things were beginning to look very grim as Tony Abbott abandons his previous support for the ETS:

Another major figure in the Liberal party has hardened his position on the ETS, making it even more difficult for Malcolm Turnbull to claim that the party backs his views on climate change:

MALCOLM Turnbull is facing growing shadow cabinet pressure to vote down the government’s emissions trading bills, with former minister Tony Abbott abandoning his earlier support for the Opposition Leader’s strategy to try to amend and pass the scheme.

Mr Abbott’s shift, and Liberal Senate leader Nick Minchin’s strong advocacy of the “vote no” view within the Coalition, will make it harder for Mr Turnbull to persuade his shadow cabinet to support the deal expected to be finalised between the government and the opposition by early next week.

And then, to add to the already explosive mix, came the firecracker that was Climategate, as thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were made public, just days before the start of the Copenhagen climate summit:

Apparently a huge quantity of highly sensitive emails and data have been “hacked” from the Hadley Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK. I haven’t yet had a chance to consider any of them in detail. I am not publishing anything until we know more clearly what their precise legal status is.

However, I have read some of them and if they are real and not fake, this is absolute dynamite, and will destroy the credibility of the alarmist cause.

Check out my other posts on this:

• “Marooned” – hilarious photoshopped image from the Hadley Files;
• “Hadley/CRU emails/data are real“
• “Moonbat media plays down Hadley leak“

A leadership spill is called, and despite Turnbull not having the numbers, he pulls a trick out of the bag, and claims victory:

Turnbull refused to comment on the numbers in the party room, but sources indicate that a majority of the party room spoke against accepting the amendments, with numbers approximately 41 – 33 against the government’s proposals.

But then Turnbull pulls a trick. The usual procedure is for the shadow cabinet to vote on the issue. This they did – in favour of accepting the amendments. The next step is for the issue then to be put to the party room – so according to this, it should have been rejected.

But what Turnbull did was add in the votes of the shadow cabinet to the party room result, thereby claiming that the “party room” was in favour, at the same time including Nationals front benchers in the shadow cabinet (who were actually against it), but excluding Nationals back benchers, who were also against it!

It was an astonishing display. Turnbull just kept repeating the phrase “I’m the leader and I’ve made the call”, so desperate is he to satisfy his own green tendencies against the will of the party room. All I can say is, I hope you won’t be leader for long.

To those in the Liberal party who voted against this climate madness, you cannot let this stand. You know what you need to do.

Abbott resigned a few days later, scuttling Labor’s plan to get the ETS through parliament. And then came the news we in the climate realist camp were hoping for:

Liberal Tony Abbott says he will throw his hat into the ring against Malcolm Turnbull tomorrow whether or not Joe Hockey is a contender for the liberal leadership.

Mr Abbott said after a day of discussions with Mr Hockey, who is in favour of a free vote on the emissions trading scheme, he had decided he needed to challenge whoever may be standing at the Liberal party room meeting.

The latest bombshell throws yet more confusion into the leadership debacle.

Mr Abbott had always said he would stand aside if Mr Hockey contested the leadership, but that position has changed because the shadow treasurer isn’t willing to adopt the hard line on the ETS.

Game on! The vote is set for 1 December. ACM writes:

The leadership election boils down to this:

• Malcolm Turnbull – we will have an ETS by the end of the day on a policy vote
• Joe Hockey – we will have an ETS by the end of the day on a conscience vote
• Tony Abbott – we won’t have an ETS today

Come on guys – don’t let us down. There is only one choice.

In the evening of 1 December, the news comes through that Abbott is the leader. I was following events on my Blackberry, and posted the update from a theatre in North Sydney! Abbott comes out fighting:

This is precisely what we need – as has been said before, an election campaign is the only way in which the ETS can be exposed for what it is – a tax on everything based on flawed and exaggerated science.

TONY Abbott will steer the Liberal Party back to its conservative roots with a 2010 election campaignportraying Kevin Rudd as a Whitlamesque big spender whose climate change policies will smash Australian jobs.

The new Opposition Leader’s first act after ousting Malcolm Turnbull in a partyroom vote yesterday was to scrap his party’s support for Labor’s carbon emissions trading scheme, which he dismissed as “a great big tax”.

And Mr Abbott immediately moved to repair the Liberals’ shattered relations with the Nationals, embracing their contempt for the ETS after months of Mr Turnbull dismissing their views as irrelevant.

The UN talks in Copenhagen are an unmitigated disaster, and the ETS was voted down in the Senate. By early 2010, the ETS had been shelved until at least 2013 – and Rudd signs his own death warrant, as ACM reports on 23 June:

As I watch Sky’s coverage, there is a possible leadership challenge to Kevin Rudd underway in Canberra right now.

It is being reported that the challenge is being pushed by the right factions in Victoria and South Australia. The question is whether Julia Gillard will agree to be put forward as replacement.

By the next day, we had a new PM:

Kevin Rudd has stepped down and Julia Gillard is now Australia’s first female prime minister. In the end, there was no ballot in the Labor caucus room – Rudd realised that he had so little support. Wayne Swan is the new deputy PM.

The press are pinning Rudd’s downfall primarily on his failure to go ahead with the ETS back in April.

A disastrous day for Labor, and it will be very interesting to see what Gillard does with the policy nightmares – the mining tax, asylum seekers etc, but in particular the ETS, which may be back on the policy table.

Days before the 2010 election, Gillard makes her now infamous promise:

“There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.”

The result of the 2010 election is on a knife edge, with three independents, Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott holding the balance of power. After several weeks of negotiation, Windsor and Oakeshott back Gillard and Labor, ignoring their conservative electorates:

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?

In February 2011, however, Gillard drops the bombshell – a carbon tax in 2012:

Climate Madness in its purest form. What we suspected all along has been proved right. Julia Gillard’s promise in August 2010 not to introduce a carbon tax “under the government I lead” was a barefaced lie. How many more has she told? Will we ever find out? She has cynically deceived the electorate on this crucial issue, and should suffer the consequences at the next election.

JULIA Gillard plans to introduce a carbon price from July 1 next year and defy the Greens by insisting on compensation for the coal and electricity industries, in a move that will infuriate its minority government partner.

The Weekend Australian understands the government will present its multi-party climate change committee next week with a plan for a fixed carbon price to operate from July 1, 2012, until about 2015-16 when the regime will move to an emissions trading scheme.

ACM reminds readers what a carbon tax would do:

So in summary, assuming that the carbon tax is passed into law, let’s remind ourselves what it would achieve:

• nothing whatsoever for climate
• nothing whatsoever for global temperatures
• nothing whatsoever for local temperatures
• nothing whatsoever for the Arctic
• nothing whatsoever for polar bears
• nothing whatsoever for the drought or floods or clyclones
• nothing whatsoever for the Great Barrier Reef
• nothing whatsoever for Kakadu
• nothing whatsoever for Tuvalu and all the other sinking islands
• nothing whatsoever for the ringtail possum and other cuddly creatures
• nothing whatsoever for bushfires and heatwaves
• in fact, nothing whatsoever for anything even remotely related to the climate

On the other hand it will do the following:

• everything to damage Australia’s economy
• everything to damage Australia’s competitiveness
• everything to increase the cost of living for ordinary Australians
• everything to make the poorest in society worse off
• everything to damage emissions intensive industries
• everything to ensure that our industries move offshore
• everything to create more unemployment
• everything to raise electricity, gas and food prices
• everything to assist a pointless global “deal”
• everything to advance the cause of global government and global wealth distribution

Have I missed anything there?

At the end of June 2012, ACM wrote an editorial on the coming climate madness:

On Sunday 1 July 2012, the Labor/Green government’s carbon tax of $23 per tonne will finally take effect in Australia.

We’ve heard all the usual spin from Greg Combet about how other countries are taking similar action and Australia must “catch up”. It’s all bullshit as anyone with half a brain could work out. Unfortunately, Combet and Gillard and their Green mates don’t have half a brain between them, so they can’t work it out. In any case, it’s all Green blackmail anyway, to keep Gillard in power.

Coming at a time when:

• the European economy could collapse at any moment thanks to any number of bankrupt states teetering on the brink of default,
• economic confidence in the US is low, and
• our own resources-run economy is feeling the pinch from decreased demand from China (even ignoring the punishing mining tax),

to legislate what is essentially the world’s highest carbon tax, when European carbon prices have been falling like a stone, and now stand around $10, is pure climate madness – and what originally gave this blog its name back in 2008.

And of course, it will do NOTHING for the climate. Our emissions will actually rise. And China and India’s emissions will rise several orders of magnitude more than any notional reduction here in Australia for decades to come. [read the remainder here]

The broken promise of the carbon tax goes down like Lord Monckton at a Greenpeace fundraiser:

The vultures are circling. Labor politicians are openly discussing the need for drastic action. Labor primary vote has sunk to 28%. And the carbon tax backflip has a lot to do with it, that and Labor’s desperate agreement with the extremist Greens to form a minority government:

A LABOR senator says today’s disastrous Newspoll should be a “clarion call” to the party to make dramatic changes or face a decade in the political wilderness.

Rudd supporter Mark Bishop said the poll, revealing a three point slump in Labor’s primary vote to 28 per cent, should be a wake-up call to the party to respond to the will of voters.

While stopping short of calling for Julia Gillard to stand down, the West Australian senator said it was clear there was now no prospect of a recovery under current circumstances.

Gillard was already finished. Prior to the 2013 election, Gillard was dumped, and Kevin Rudd was installed. Despite a brief bump in the polls, the electorate soon remembered that Rudd was a psychopath, and Labor’s electoral chances were zero:

Rudd is branded an “elitist grub who thinks he is superior to all” by someone who had the misfortune to have to work with him, whereas Abbott is a “gentleman with a capital G”. Following the debate last night, the make-up artist who worked on both Rudd and Abbott wrote on her Facebook page:

“One of them was absolutely lovely, engaged in genuine conversation with me, acknowledge that I had a job to do and was very appreciative. The other did the exact opposite! Oh boy, I have ever had anyone treat me so badly whilst trying to do my job. Political opinions aside… from one human being to another… Mr Abbott, you win hands down.”

Just confirms the fact (if such confirmation were needed) that Rudd is a pompous, arrogant, sociopathic bully, disconnected with real people to the point of autism.  [via Bolt]

On 8 September 2013, Australia woke up from the nightmare. The hangover was gone, the headache cleared, and there was a bright future ahead:

The six-year Labor/Green nightmare is finally over. Tony Abbott is the nation’s new Prime Minister.

Abbott gave a brief, dignified victory speech, promising to govern for all Australians, in stark contrast to Labor who only sought to entrench division and disunity. Rudd, on the other hand, rambled on for what seemed like an eternity in his concession speech, as if he himself was the victor – delusional to the last.

Whilst Rudd will not contest the Labor leadership, he will remain in parliament as an ever-present threat of destabilisation.

Labor’s nightmare has only just begun.

Then we had the unparalleled joy of seeing the climate infrastructure rapidly demolished, with Tim Flannery and the Climate Commission the first to go:

The Climate Commission didn’t have one single climate realist on board, and was stacked with Australia’s worst alarmists, Will Steffen, David Karoly and Flannery himself. Far from being an independent climate body, it was a mouthpiece for Labor government propaganda and shameless scaremongering.

Good riddance to the lot of ‘em.

UPDATE: Commission’s Twitter account (@ClimateComm) has vanished already! Sad to see the website still there… not for long, however.

UPDATE 2: The ever-warmist ABC (Anything But Conservatives) gives Flannery space to gnash his teeth and wail about the injustice of it all:

Professor Flannery, who is also a former Australian of the Year, has defended the commission’s role.

“We’ve stayed out of the politics and stuck to the facts,” he said. [BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! – Ed]

“As a result we’ve developed a reputation as a reliable apolitical source of facts on all aspects of climate change. [Stop it!! Stop it!! My sides are splitting!!!!! – Ed]

“I believe that Australians have a right to know – a right to authoritative, independent and accurate information on climate change. [Er, I think I just wet myself… – Ed]

“We’ve just seen one of the earliest ever starts to the bushfire season in Sydney following the hottest twelve months on record.” [And, Flannery goes out true to form, with a ridiculously alarmist statement… See ya’ later pal. Glad we won’t have to hear from you any more – Ed]

And now, finally, after over 2,700 posts and over 16,000 comments from you, the readers, the carbon tax has gone. I think we can all be proud of our achievement.

Bill Shorten, however, hasn’t learned his lesson. He has vowed to take carbon pricing to the next election, and as Christopher Pyne rightly says, it will hang like a rotting carcass round his neck until election day.

As Albert Einstein once remarked, insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. Shorten is doing precisely that.