Let’s see how this holds up in November, if the ETS is voted down again:

“I have not the slightest intention of going to an early poll,” he told Melbourne radio 3AW this morning.

What, you mean, you’re going to abandon the habit of a lifetime and not try to score cheap political points out of all this? Given past experience, I find that very hard to believe.

Read it here.

Bravo Nick Minchin, leader of the Opposition in the Senate, for pointing out so clearly the fraud that is the two-errors-in-four-words “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” on Tuesday (h/t Andrew Bolt):

Not only is the timing of this legislative initiative to be condemned, so too should the very name given to this package of legislation be condemned by this parliament… For no more than base political purposes, the government has called its emissions trading scheme a ‘carbon pollution reduction scheme’. This is of course the perpetuation of a cruel hoax on the Australian people, childishly simplistic and misleading. The scheme proposed does not deal with carbon. It purports to deal with something quite separate—carbon dioxide emissions—and the scheme does not deal with pollution.

Whatever the climatic role of human induced emissions of CO2, CO2 is not by any stretch of the imagination a pollutant. CO2 is, as we know, a clear, odourless, colourless gas vital to life on earth… Indeed the Rudd government knows it too. Its own environment department’s website has a link to the official Australian National Pollutant Inventory, which lists 93 pollutants. Surprise, surprise, carbon dioxide is not listed among them….

It is also typical of this deceitful and spin-driven government to so cynically misrepresent the nature of carbon dioxide. Of course this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming… The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century…

Australia contributes a little over one per cent of the planet’s CO2 emissions. If we were to completely shut down the Australian economy tomorrow, Australia’s
CO2 emissions would be fully replaced by China within nine months. It is indisputably the case that nothing Australia does on its own can have any impact whatsoever on the earth’s climate. The deceit perpetrated by climate change fanatics that an Australian ETS will save the Barrier Reef is utterly contemptible…

The cruel joke is that all those thousands of jobs to be destroyed by Labor’s CPRS will be in vain, because this scheme will make absolutely no difference to the global climate.

See here for Senate Hansard.

As always, a great read!

“Exterminate, exterminate!”

I’m convinced of it. Strip away that icy façade, and there’s nothing but a tangle of wires and motors. At the end of the day, I think they switch her off, plug her into the mains to recharge, and then shove her in a cupboard until morning. It’s a great plan, but I think there are a few problems – the program has got a bug and is now stuck in an infinite loop, causing the Wong-bot to repeat the same hackneyed climate nonsense over and over again; and the aural receptor module has burnt out, causing her to not hear anything anyone says.

Senator Wong is maintaining the pressure against the Coalition for its stance and says today’s Senate showdown is a “day of reckoning” for the Parliament.

“What is certain today is that Labor senators will vote for the national interest and what appears certain is that Opposition senators and the crossbenchers will not,” she told ABC Radio’s AM program. [i.e. the national interest is what I say it is – Ed]

“Today is the big day, it’s the day of reckoning on this issue.

“This is a reform that is long overdue, that is in the national interest, that both major political parties said they would implement.”

The Wong-bot doesn’t even acknowledge that the problem lies with Labor, with Kevin Rudd, and with herself. They have arrogantly refused to even consider that their dog’s breakfast of an ETS may be less than perfect, and may benefit from some changes (i.e. chucking it in the dumpster).

Time for a CTRL-ALT-DEL reboot, Penny.

Read it here.

UPDATED: The evidence piles up. The voice synthesizer is on an endless loop as well:

We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because it is the right thing to do.

We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because it is the responsible thing to do.

We will bring this bill back before the end of the year because we on this side understand we have to start the economic transformation we need.

And we will bring this bill back before the end of the year because if we don’t this nation goes to Copenhagen with no means to deliver our targets.

Sounds like something from an episode of The Jetsons…

Read it here.

We knew it would happen, so no real surprise. What will be interesting is what happens next:

MALCOLM Turnbull has accused Climate Change Minister Penny Wong of “pedantic bloody-mindedness” after the emissions trading scheme was voted down by the Senate today.

“A few days ago we’d showed her a few alternatives that would make for a scheme that was greener, cheaper and smarter,” the Opposition Leader told ABC Radio, “and she just dismissed it out of hand.”

The Government and the Coaltion did not hold discussions over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme bills although Senator Wong indicated earlier this week that the Government was open to talks.

“If Mr Turnbull puts up serious and credible amendments that have the support of his partyroom then I’m prepared to discuss them with him,” she said. “He has not.”

Mr Turnbull said the Opposition would “work through” amendments during the next few weeks and months but wanted to discuss their formation with the Government.

“If Penny Wong is saying she will not have any discussion with us until such time as we present formal, legislative amendments, then that will take some time,” Mr Turnbull said.

“This is really pedantic bloody-mindedness, stubbornness on her part.”

Read it here.

I am unfortunately busy on other things this morning, so won’t be able to post for a while, but in the mean time, Andrew Bolt does a superb job of exposing the hysteria of the government in trying to pass its fraudulent “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”:

WE’VE seen mass hysteria before, but we weren’t then mad enough to make it government policy.

Four years ago, Melbourne airport was closed when staff caught a bad case of panic from each other, imagining that they, too, had got a whiff of some toxic gas that no investigator could find and no passing passenger could smell.

Forty-seven people were whisked to hospital to be treated for vague illnesses no doctor could detect, in a farce psychologists later blamed in part on our new paranoia over pollution.

But that’s nothing when compared with today’s galloping paranoia over invisible gases, which threatens to shut not just one airport, but entire industries and power stations.

This is the mass hysteria over global warming – a hysteria caught by millions of Australians who can no more explain why they’re sure the world is heating to hell than they can explain why it’s now cooling instead.

All this would be frightening enough—another sign of our retreat from reason—but what makes it worse is that this hysteria is not being fought by governments, but hyped, in the grossest dereliction of duty I’ve seen from our politicians in my lifetime.

READ IT ALL!!

At least it’s a start:

A meeting of federal coalition MPs has agreed to vote down the government’s emissions trading legislation when it goes to a Senate vote on Thursday.

But the meeting did not endorse an alternative scheme, unveiled by Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull on Monday.

Instead, MPs welcomed the concept, which aims to double Labor’s carbon reduction target of five per cent yet cost 40 per cent less than the government’s model.

Under Mr Turnbull’s model, developed by Frontier Economics, electricity generators would operate under a separate baseline scheme.

Doing so would limit an increase in household electricity bills to $44 a year, compared to the $280 estimated in Labor’s carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS).

One coalition MP spoke against emissions trading in any form, expressing concern about the impact on power generators.

Earlier, Mr Turnbull took coalition’s climate change message onto the internet, calling on the government to negotiate on its doomed CPRS.

In the 90-second message posted on YouTube on Tuesday morning, Mr Turnbull says Labor is being reckless in pursuing its scheme without considering alternatives such as the “hybrid” scheme he launched on Monday.

Read it here.

At least we can still put our collective faith in the Nationals, the only party left in Australia (apart from the recently formed Climate Sceptics) to see through the IPCC spin. The Nationals have confirmed they will continue to oppose an ETS, splitting from the Liberal policy of negotiation with the government.

Nationals sources confirmed the plan yesterday as the party’s Senate leader, Barnaby Joyce, hardened his opposition to an ETS, and insisted his party had a right to its own policy for the sake of diversity and proper representation of voters.

Senator Joyce’s comments came as other senior Nationals sources said there was growing frustration within the junior Coalition partner over the Liberal Party’s preparedness to work with them on policy development.

Yesterday’s release of a Frontier Economics research paper proposing an ETS with lower impacts on electricity prices than the Rudd government’s proposed scheme highlighted the policy differences between the Liberals and the Nationals.

While the Liberals are open to negotiation with the government over an ETS, the Nationals have made it clear for months that they would require major and fundamental change to even consider supporting a scheme.

The government, on the other hand, are showing no sign of compromise, if Penny Wong’s poker-faced performance on ABC this morning is anything to go by.

Read it here.

Malcolm Turnbull, flanked by Andrew Robb and Senator Nick Xenophon, proudly announced today that he engaged an economic research organisation (doubtless at not inconsiderable cost) to analyse the economic impacts of Rudd’s proposed ETS, and to propose a way to make it “greener” whilst at the same time cheaper. The report runs to over 100 pages, and I really don’t have the inclination (nor the time) to review it in detail, for reasons which will become apparent. If you wish to read it, however, it can be found here.

The entire premise of this document is fundamentally flawed. As Andrew Bolt pointed out this morning, Turnbull seeking to out-green Rudd is a tacit acknowledgement that he accepts the argument (also flawed) that emissions of CO2 are causing dangerous climate change and must therefore be reduced. I was horrified to see that the document uses, without question or criticism, the government’s term “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” and “CPRS” throughout – falling headlong into the government’s trap of labelling the harmless trace gas carbon dioxide, plant food and essential for all life on earth, as “pollution”.

And the subtext of all this is that we need deeper cuts in emissions. How wrong can Turnbull, Robb and Xenophon be? They have accepted, again without question, the word of the IPCC, which we know to be a politically motivated organisation whose terms of reference require it to focus solely on “human-caused” climate change. You should also bear in mind the ultimate aim of the UN – global governance and control. There is nothing that is more likely to deliver such global governance into the hands of a grateful UN than the hysteria of climate change.

The science is not “settled” – the debate is not over. New discoveries about the hugely complex climate system are being made literally every day. New research shows that solar variation has a huge part to play in major climatic variations, and that cosmic rays also have a significant effect on climate – both issues that the IPCC chooses to downplay significantly. How can Turnbull therefore be so blinkered as to believe the IPCC’s (and the government’s) spin on the causes of climate change, and be certain enough in their predictions of catastrophic climate change to burden future generations with this disastrous tax?

Regrettably, ACM hopes that the Government refuses to entertain any change to the ETS either at this vote or the next (which looks like happening), thereby forcing the Coalition to do what it should have decided to do long ago, namely vote against it at any and every opportunity.

So, the ETS senate vote is nearly here, and all the indications are that it will be voted down – but for nearly all the wrong reasons.

The barking mad Greens will vote it down because they don’t believe the two-errors-in-four-words Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme goes far enough. In the fantasy world inhabited by Bob Brown and his ilk, environmental issues trump anything and everything, and the cost to the average Australian is just the price that has to be paid, despite the fact that nothing Australia does will make the slightest difference to the climate. It is amazing that anyone votes for the Greens, because if they actually stopped to think about it, a vote for the Greens is like a turkey voting for Christmas. Green politics does not care about people, or their welfare – in fact it despises humanity. It only cares about the imaginary Gaia, the god to which we should all make the ultimate sacrifice.

The Liberals will vote it down because they are waiting for Penny Wong to listen to some of their “amendments”, dangling the carrot that they might vote for it next time around. Furthermore, Malcolm Turnbull is desperately trying to appear more green than Rudd, as Andrew Bolt points out. As we all know, this is the completely the wrong direction for the Coalition to be taking, but Turnbull is in such strife politically that he probably is more concerned about his own future than doing the right thing for Australia.

The Nationals are the only party that will vote down this legislation for the right reasons, namely:

• it will achieve no benefit whatsoever for the climate;
• it is nothing more than a politically correct gesture towards environmentalism;
• it is a stealth tax dressed up as a “scheme” and has huge revenue generating potential for the government, and which smacks of wealth redistribution; and,
• it will cost the Australian people dear, in terms of employment, competitiveness and standard of living, for decades to come.

As mentioned yesterday, every parliamentarian in Canberra should be forced to read Quadrant Online’s ETS Forum from beginning to end, and ACM urges readers to email links to these articles to their local senators.

The public still appear ambivalent about the ETS and climate change in general. I fear that it may take the introduction of this dreadful legislation, and the doubling of energy prices, for the electorate to realise the horrible mistake they have made. Again, readers of this blog are encouraged to raise awareness of this issue as widely as they can. Until the public realise the seriousness of this, Australia will sleepwalk into oblivion.